CSS Web Design
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets.
Cascading style sheets allow the content of a web page, the text and graphics, to be separated from the formatting and styling of that content.
If you consider a house to be analogous to a web page, then content on the website would be equivalent to the building materials, such as the brick, timbers and windows, and the Style Sheet would be the blueprints used to build the house. In the same way that different blueprints allow the same building materials to be arranged into completely buildings, different style sheets allow the content on your site to be formatted in completely different ways.
As you can imagine, muddling content together with the styling of that content results in a very inefficient website, that is difficult and therefore expensive to update. Using style sheets to cleanly separate the content from the styling is beneficial, both from the point of view of styling existing pages and also updating and adding new content. Adding a new page to a site is simply a case of gathering the new content together, the style sheets then automatically lay that new content out so that it fits in with the overall design of the site. It is possible to refresh a site by redesigning a few style sheets, this way the whole site get an entirely new look without time consuming and expensive process of updating each page.
Whilst it is possible to build sites with the style defined as part of the page content, rather than in a separate CSS file, this is considered bad practise for the following reasons:
- Your site's code will be bulkier.
This can reduce the visibility of your site to the major search engines. - It will slow down your site's loading time.
Once a style sheet has been downloaded into a visitors browser, it can be applied to every page of your site, without the need to repeatedly download it. - It makes updating your site's look more time consuming
If you want to, say, change the colour of your site's text, then with an external style sheet you only need to change one place, rather than everywhere that style appears.
Each website we create is built using fully validating Cascading Style Sheets.
It amazes us that despite all the benefits of using CSS, a freely available technology which is over fifteen years old, that there are still some web design companies that do not use it for their client's sites. If you already have a site, we can offer you the following CSS services:
- Rebuild your site using style sheets.
Whilst sites should be built with code and style as separate entities, often this is not the case. In the past, sites were built with the styling as part of the page. We can re-build your site correctly. - Make your CSS validate.
If you run your site through the W3C CSS validator (http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/), you can see if there are any coding errors in your style sheet. We are able to do any bug fixes. - Make your style sheet browser compatible.
Different browsers can sometimes display styles differently. We can fix any browser compatibility errors so that your site displays correctly in all modern browsers. - Create a print style sheet
Style sheets can make a page display differently depending on how it is viewed. For example, what is shown to a mobile phone could be different to someone viewing a site on a monitor. Where this can be particularly practical is if people want to print pages of your site. We can make it so only the parts of the page that need to be printed will be printed, and that it will print full page.
If you have any questions about how CSS can improve your website, please get in touch.