What a style sheet looks like

Here's the homepage that uses that style sheet

Using Style Sheets for Designing Your Website

A Style Sheet is a list of styles that displays the parts of your web site in certain ways. It may affect the positioning, the font, colors, margins and much more. It can do more with greater precision than HTML alone. You don’t HAVE to learn it or use it, but by studying it a little you may find that you want to use it.

You don’t have to use CSS to control everything on the page, you can use it for one element or as many as you choose to.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

You don’t really have to understand this term but it means that there can be styles set by more that the style sheet that you create, like the browser, the computer user. These can all exist and can all exert control over a single webpage or element at once. When that happens they are said to Cascade over one another.

External Style Sheets

Styles can be created in the HTML code or they can be created for as many elements of the webpage as you want to style and put together on one document which is usually kept in the same folder with the pages and has a file extension of .css to indicate its purpose. These external style sheets seem to be the most popular way to use CSS styles.

Some Advantages of CSS

For a multi-page site, you can create a style sheet to set the pages to the style you want and by placing a link to the file in each HTML page, you give them all the exact appearance that you want.
This makes for less overall code and faster loading.
It makes the page simpler for the search engines to read .
It makes maintenance easy, you just have to change the styling code on the style sheet. No changes to the other pages is required, they all just do what the new code tells them to do.

CSS is the upcoming thing so you will probably move to it at some point. That’s because the last version of HTML was declared to be the last one. Further advancements are to be made using styles.

Some Disadvantages of CSS.

Well, of course, you have to learn something ELSE. So there is some time and effort in that, but you may find it’s offset by making maintenance of the site simpler, easier and faster. Not all browsers display CSS exactly the same, so there may be some inconsistencies for your viewers.

Inexpensive Webpage Templates That Use CSS

Get webpage templates that use External CSS Style Sheets for $5 which includes, images, page layouts as well as the style sheet. It’s certainly worth the money and you can experiment by changing the style sheet to achieve various effects.

http://www.basictemplates.com/cgi-bin/a.pl?basicweb&1057

Microsoft FrontPage has over a dozen built-in Style Sheets and they keep you away from coding most of the time.

You can use a preference setting in the Free Netscape Composer HTML editor to set formatting of text and backgrounds using CSS code instead of HTML code if you choose. Get it in this download:

http://channels.netscape.com/ns/browsers/default.jsp

(261KB)