Help wanted- CSS Guru

Think of css as short-hand.

Simple example... you look at the way text is formated in this post. You want all text to appear the same in all posts. Normally to format the text you need to specify things like, it's size, its color, its alignment, etc. All these things you specify in your normal html tags. But there are two problems

1) you don't like having to type all that stuff every time
2) if you ever want to change those properties, you need to go through and change those tags in every place you have that text in your site. Not fun!

CSS solves this problem by allowing you to replace all those tags with a single style statement. Instead of saying 'make it black, size 10, aligned left', you make up a style called 'body_text' and just assign that style to the text rather then typing out all the tags.

The style 'body_text' is defined ahead of time, either in the file itself, or in .css files that are automatically opened by the web page. By putting them in a separate .css file, the same file can be referenced by all pages, and changing the one definition in the file automatically propagates throughout your entire website!

css alone doesn't add any capabilities to your website - its still all the same html. What it does is allow you to build with consistency and simplifies code creation and maintenance.

That's the 'what is it'... how to do it is more specific to html formating. The w3schools are good reference and tutorials for simple tasks.

Does that help? Or were you already past and and looking for the implementation side?

 

css is just syntax for presenting standard HTML formatting.

The bulk of it is probably fear of HTML itself - rather then being able to use a GUI editor, etc. You won't be able to use css effectivly unless you understand the HTML itself - because CSS is just macros, or short-hand.

The nasty part where people become 'good' or experts is dealing with larger implementations, nesting, etc. For the basic stuff, its just mainly HTML and fear of raw html.

For instance, this site is completely built with CSS - but they make it easy (in the software we use) because they provide a CSS editor that lays out all the most used styles, and gives you a simple UI to change all the properties. http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/main/stylemanager_css

I'm not familar with how the PC based GUI editors handle CSS - though I'm sure they must.

I'm not a real web page implementor, I leave it to the pros. My webpages are still total hacks built in text editors where the most complex portions are links and h1/etc tags

 

Then you should stick with whatever graphical editor your provider gives you

CSS isn't going to change the way your site looks - it changes the way your site is coded/built.

They probably offer different templates to change the style and format of your site (and they use css in their templates)