Using Cascading Style Sheets

Cascading style sheets (CSS) allow you to have greater control over your designs and can help your site meet accessibility guidelines.

The easiest way to start using CSS is to start replacing deprecated HTML tags like <font> with CSS selectors. Writing CSS rules that govern basic stylistic elements of your page like font family, size and color is relatively simple as is declaring the background and link colors for your page. Once you’ve mastered this, try using CSS for positioning and other advanced techniques. Always keep in mind that not all browsers are entirely CSS compliant and perform frequent cross-platform and cross-browser testing as you develop your style sheets.

One way to help ensure that your CSS will work on as many browser/platform combinations as possible is to validate your CSS. If you use Firefox as your browser, you can download the handy web developer’s toolbar that makes validating your CSS easy.

For a site with many pages, it is generally a good practice to create an external style sheet to govern the styles that are necessary for all of your pages. This way, you only have to change one file to implement a change that will occur throughout your site.