1. Introduction
2. What are Cascading Style Sheets?
3. Ways to Add CSS to your Website
4. Ways to Add CSS to your Website: Numbers Two and Three
5. Two CSS tips.
6. Resources and further reading

What are Cascading Style Sheets?

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a mark-up language like HTML, used to format various elements on a webpage. These elements include everything HTML can format (such as text type and size, backgrounds, margins, padding, and color) and more (like link rollovers, or text highlighting). Like HTML, CSS is just text that is saved in a text file. The text is saved with the file extension ".css" or directly in your ".html" document.

Why would you use them?

There are many advantages to using CSS. In my opinion the top two reasons to use CSS are:

1. For saving massive amounts of time with easy page-wide and (even better) site-wide changes.
2. For developing and maintaining a consistent look and feel across your whole website.

CSS allows for the separation of content and design/formatting. This is an important step for the developing webmaster. The formatting for all webpage elements can be placed in a single style sheet that all the pages on the website link to. In this style sheet, the webmaster defines for the pages that links to it, various design elements such as color, size, padding, margins, and even the positioning of elements.

As we know, sometimes we webmasters make mistakes. CSS helps reduce mistakes as they save the webmaster from having to apply formatting in every single page to all the page elements. Thus using CCS reduces the risk that a webmaster may miss a font tag here or there and saves us from having to remember what the specifics of the formats were from page to page to page to page? You get the picture. Now here?s the really great part. Because the formatting for the whole website exists in one single file, site-wide changes can be made quickly and easily in one single sheet.

There are many other good reasons to use CSS. I'll mention some briefly to introduce you to some of the benefits of CSS. You'll find more detail in the further reading and resources listed at the end of this article.

1. Greater design choices (supplementing the look and limitations of HTML)
2. The reduction of tags in your code thus saving your eyes, your time, your users' page load time, and everybodys' bandwidth.
3. Positioning layers so that the order of content in an html page may be different than the order displayed on the page.
4. The ability to present multiple format and view options to different users on the same page.
5. Accessibility.
6. Cross platform browsing including for mobile devices.

Sean Buscay
www.christian-web-masters.comSean Buscay is on a mission to CREATE, ADVANCE, and EXPOUND faith in JESUS using web technology. He is the owner of Christian-Web-Masters.com .