Resources: Websites

What is CSS?

CSS stands for ‘Cascading Style Sheets’.
 
CSS is a language which was developed by ‘The World Wide Web Consortium’ (W3C), primarily to allow the contents of a website (written in HTML and XHTML) and formatting (the CSS) to live on separate files.
 
This means, that rather than having the formatting on each page, it’s an external document that is linked to all the pages.

For instance, see what the cerise home page really looks like:

If we link it to the CSS file, it will look like this:

As well as the fact that CSS is ‘the language of the future’, there are many advantages in using CSS to build websites:

It will save you time & money. CSS is much faster and easier to code, therefore will reduce development time.

It is easy to maintain. Amendments to the style will require only changing one file, rather than every single page on your website. Again, saving you money and time!

Your website will load faster. Having the formatting live on a single file rather than on each page, means that there is much less code, therefore the site will load faster.

Your website will be viewable by various media, such as PDA’s and mobile phone browsers, as well as ‘accessibility readers’.

Your website will be printer friendly. When users decide to print a page, another CSS file can be called. This CSS file can ‘get rid of’ everything that isn’t needed on the paper, such as navigation and buttons etc.

Your website will be search engine friendly. CSS improves the readability of your pages. The amount of relevant content will be greater than the amount of code, which means that the search engines won’t have to make much of an effort to find it.

CSS is the future and websites that aren’t built using this language could find themselves, at some point in the future, unreadable by browsers.