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The History and Development of Web Design
When the World Wide Web was originally invented, it was unique in its ability to link pages together using hyperlinks. It uses a markup language known as HTML, or HyperText Markup Language. New technologies continue to change the way the web works, ...
Using External Coding To Improve Search Engine Placement
Do you have lots of JavaScript coding in the header section of your web pages? Do you re-list your CSS styles at the top of every page? Do you have JavaScript coding spread throughout your web pages?If you answered yes to any of these questions your site ...
Webmaster Secrets for Top 10 Search Results in Google, Yahoo and MSN.
In the following article a very simple 3 step process will reveal just howsimple search engine optimisation can be once you know how. There are multitudes of websites that will theorise you to death about engine algorithms, page rank formulas, key-word ...
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What is CSS?
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets - it is basically a way of saying once what you want your pages to look like, instead of having to repeat it in HTML all the way through the document. In old style HTML, for example, this kind of code was a relatively common sight:
Welcome to my website!
I hope you enjoy your visit.
Now, though, you can remove the font tags altogether, and just have this:
Welcome to my website!
I hope you enjoy your visit.
At the top of your website, you put a style tag, like this:
Now, instead of having to say again which font you're using with every new paragraph, you've told the browser that you want every paragraph you've got to be in Arial.
Headings and Lists
Thanks to CSS, you can make documents that are more 'semantically correct' - that is, they would make sense to a human reading them, instead of having to be weighed down with lots of extra presentation code. This has two great effects: it makes web pages smaller (and so faster to download), and it makes them simpler.
On a modern web page, the only things you should ever need to include apart from paragraphs of text are headings and lists. After all, web pages are just text, graphics and navigation put together in a particular order - there's no reason for things to be done as messily as they often are.
You use headings for the title and subtitles of your page - they're the HTML tags that begin with h. You might, for example, write website title article title .
Lists, on the other hand, can be used for pretty much anything else that isn't paragraphs of text. Instead of just
putting links one after the other to make a navigation bar, for example, you should put them in a list, using the ul and li tags. Not only is this easier for you to read and add to, but it's also more compatible with non-graphical browsers.
A typical list looks like this:
Bold, Italic, and Images.
Of course, in practice, you'll need a few more tags. CSS lacks any good way of making individual words bold or italicised, so you can still use your b and i tags. Images, of course, still need a tag of their own too, although you might consider putting your images in a list if you have more than one.
In theory, at least, that still means that it should be perfectly possible to create a clean looking web page using only six tags: h, ul, li, b, i and img. And, yes, it is very possible - if you can stick to this attitude towards web pages, your page will be extremely clean, quick to download and fast to display. If you've ever sat and waited more than a few seconds for a page to load, you'll know how important this is.
Custom Stylesheets
One more advantage of this approach is that it lets your users view your website however they want to. There are a surprising number of users out there who are elderly or just want some consistency on the web, and they have their own CSS stylesheets to add to pages to make text bigger, for example, or make the layout simpler.
Once you've written your page cleanly, you can even offer visitors a choice of stylesheets yourself - you can write more than one and then offer an option to switch between them. This makes redesigning your page much easier, if you ever need to, since you can simply swap one set of CSS for another and even leave the old one available for any visitors that prefer it.
About the author:
Original Source: Articles-Galore.com
Information supplied and written by Lee Asher of Eclipse Domain Services
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