CSS, which stands for cascading style sheets, has been around for several years now. This coding standard was first invented to make it easy for web designers to modify the appearance of their websites, without using any programming languages. For this reason, you will find CSS to be easy to understand, and easy to implement.
How CSS works.
CSS code can be incorporated into each and every web page on your website, or it can reside on a separate file. If it is on a separate file, you can easily include the file dynamically using a single line of code. After that, if you ever want to make changes to the CSS coding, all you need to do is to modify one single file, and the change will be applied to all pages across the website.
So what you can do with CSS?
You can use CSS to control all visual elements of your website. For example, you can use it to change the font size and colors. You can also use it to change the table properties, or the visual aspects of your web forms.
But there are so many different ways you can change the visual appearance of a website. So why use CSS?
Firstly, CSS is a client side scripting technology. In other words, there are no server implications. As long as the server can serve up simple texts, CSS will work. In this aspect, it’s a little bit similar to Javascript, except that you can’t perform programming using CSS.
Secondly, CSS is very simple to learn and pick up. If you are comfortable writing simple HTML tags, you can learn to use CSS. Also, because you can add CSS dynamically to your website, that makes it more convenient for you or your webmaster to maintain the website.
Thirdly, you have to remember that CSS was invented to complement HTML. No other scripting languages focus as much as CSS on the website appearance. It has very much become an industry standard, and can even validate CSS code on the official w3 website. Modern browsers all offer strong support for CSS.
CSS is meant to simplify your website. It’s not there to add clutter to your site. For this reason, the search engines love CSS. That’s because search engines find it easier to crawl and index web pages that are simple. There are no fancy scripting tags that confuse the search bots. So if you create a website using CSS, you are indirectly optimizing your site for the search engines. For sure, there is a side benefit that many website owners overlook.
Therefore, it makes sense to convert static HTML pages and other web images to CSS web pages. Your website will become more professional and modern looking.
