Learning CSS

I was over at a friends place the other day helping her with some web work and I wasn’t at all surprised to find out that they don’t teach designers how to code html or CSS in schools. So I put together some info for her to go over to get some basics on CSS that I’m going to share with you.

 As you may or may not know CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and is a language that describes the presentation elements of a document. HTML in itself should not have any presentational markup like the font tag, your CSS should determine how the document will look when printed, viewed in a browser or a cellphone. CSS is also a great way to make changes to a site with just editing one file rather then every one, and giving a consistent look.

When I first started using CSS the majority of my learning came from W3 Schools. It’s full of tutorials and helpful explanations of the attributes for everything. I still check this site for problems I have from time to time.

Another great resource was other people CSS. Look at other sites CSS and learn by example. Just don’t copy it colours and all and apply it to your site, the web community is very good for letting people learn by example, but steal it outright and they can become a little less friendly.

Here are some other links that might be helpful too.

Float Tutorial - Learn a bit more about the float element specifically.

Blueprint CSS - CSS framework you can use freely to develop your sites CSS, a great way to learn by example.

Image Concentration - Speed up your sites images with some fancy CSS trickery.

Margin Issues - Margins are a pain.

Advanced Formatting - Good CSS rules.

Hacks -  For various bugs.

Written by John Leschinski from Leschinski Design
Posted on November 10th, 2007 and filed under CSS
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