Web Design and all stuff related to it!

So all of us who have worked on websites before, or even have just browsed the net, have come across something called CSS. If youre familiar with HTML at all, youve definitely heard the term. With the way that the internet works, simply go to www.master-web-graphics.com there always a new update to the way that websites are coded and structured. CSS is a fairly new addition to website programmers tool box. Today we will be going over the language the history of and the pros of using CSS.

What is CSS?

Cascading Style Sheets, CSS, is a coding language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML. CSS is used by both the authors of web pages to control colors, fonts, layout, and other web page properties. It is used mainly to separate website structure from website content. This improves accessibility, flexibility and control of content presentation.

CSS History

Style sheets have existed since the beginnings of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) in the 70s. Cascading Style Sheets were developed for creating a consistent approach to providing visual presentation information for web documents. As HTML developed over time, it evolved to include a variety of stylistic capabilities for web developers. This gave designers more control over site appearance but also made HTML more complex to write and maintain. Web browser variations made consistency difficult, and web surfers had barely any control over how web pages were displayed. The W3C began working on a new way to control visual presentation of web content. Out of 9 different proposed style sheet languages, CSS grew from two of the 9, Cascading HTML Style Sheets (CHSS) and Stream-based Style Sheet Proposal (SSP). As work was done on the development of these two languages, CHSS took over, and eventually the H was dropped as these style sheets could be used with other markup languages. CSS1 specification was completed in 1996 and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 3 was released with limited support for CSS. In 2000, IE 5 was released, with full CSS support. Right now, most browsers support CSS; Including Mozilla FireFox, Internet Explorer, and Netscape Navigator. There are a few discrepancies in how each browser interprets certain CSS properties, go to www.thedesignduild.com but these have been solved with CSS hacks, workarounds, and CSS filters in order to obtain consistent results across web browsers.

Pros

Some of the advantages of using CSS are:

Visual presentation information for an entire website can be held in one CSS file, which allows for changes to be made cross-site quickly.

Different users can have different style sheets.

The documents code is reduced in size, since it does not need to contain any code pertaining to the visual presentation of content.

Pages using CSS are easier to edit in the future.

By no means is this a full explanation of CSS, as that would take many articles to fully explain. But I hope that this article explains a little bit about CSS, how it has developed, and some of the pros of using it.

If you have spent the time and money following your dream or goal of one day being a web designer or working hard towards a web design degree, you might just be waking up now to the reality of your situation.  Due to the current state of the economy, web industry, international business and many other factors, the web design world will not you let enter this market easily. Outsourcing may seem a bit intimidating at first and you might even have a moral conflict with it but you really shouldn’t if you are serious about making money one day. What’s happening is the United States is open for business for anyone with an internet connection and the ability to speak English. Since HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, JavaScript and most other web based technologies have free online tutorials this makes web design one of the most competitive industries ever. Beat the odds and begin outsourcing now.

From a project manager’s point of view, web design, development and marketing are really close to home development and construction.  The article  “Web Property Development” explains how both the web industry and construction industry are the same just one is digital and the other uses tangible,real-world materials. No matter what you still need a blueprint, to purchase land, to aquire a physical address, setup internal utilities, lay a foundation and structure, do the aesthetics and lanscaping, etc. Currently there is no union or organization to help us web designers out so until then your only hope to make decent money just might be to outsource.

Your web design degree is not a 100% scam but the industry is so new and dynamic that it’s almost impossible to find a school with lessons plans that are up to date. It’s hard to find teachers that can really hand code HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, JavaScript and the rest of the server-side nd client-side technologies because of the vast amount of skills it takes to design user friendly GUIs, proper valid HTML code, cross-browser CSS styling, secure PHP and server-side engineering as well as database architecture, Linux skills for the administration side, SEO techniques and about 200+ areas critical to most projects. If you want to dedicate your life to this or you might end up looking like a starving artist to your family, friends and possible clients. If your teachers are able to give up to date lesson plans why wouldn’t they be working on their own million dollar site instead of a teacher’s salary? Proof this industry is very hard to actually compete in.

Outsourcing could be your only option. One client that is willing to pay $1,000USD for a website normally will require 1-2 weeks of your time if you’re real good. At this rate, you eventually will only be able to handle 3-4  projects per month.  If you were to begin outsourcing parts of your design, dev or marketing you can now play project manager, hire some talent for cheap and raise your capability to 5-10 projects should your business begin to take off. You also can’t spend forever doing the work all yourself. When you hit a roadblock during the middle of a project, picking up the book and trying to become a pro overnight on a new technology or protocol is just not rational and often can result in disaster. Your best time and money saving option is to outsource to someone who already knows what you need to implement.

If you are stuck on a roadblock, outsourcing is probably the only option you have.  Finally you can get your projects completed within a reasonable budget and time frame. Let us know if you need help, our How to Outsource articles are here just for that reason. Good luck and don’t ever stop optimizing the process!

For more of this visit this link LAYOUTS

Layout Galaby Alessandro Fulciniti – a collection of 40 CSS layouts based on the same markup and ready for download! Look Ma, No Tables.CSS Layout Techniques: for Fun and Profit ThreeColumnLayoutscss-discuss – Bob Easton Open Source Web DesignDownload and upload free web designs Open Web DesignDownload and upload free web designs Sample CSS Page LayoutsHere are a range of CSS page layouts, including 2 column and 3 column layouts – free to use and abuse as needed Yet Another Multicolumn LayoutA multi-column layout CSS LayoutsStu Nicholls – Three columns, CSS frame, “Fixed”, Cross browser…. CSS TEMPLATESAll templates are XHTML 1.0 and CSS2 css Zen Gardenlist of all Zen Garden designs added to date..980+ layouts Flexi-Floats3 Column CSS Layout – Fluid, Multi-Column Stretch – Header, Footer, Fluid Center – Fixed or Fluid widths FirdamaticFirdamatic is an online tableless layout generator that allows you to create and customise layouts easily… Free CSS Template Code GeneratorMaker for 3 Column Layout (tableless) Page Maker – The Generator Form v2.90CSS Source Ordered Variable Border 1-3 Columned Page Maker QrONE CSS DesignerOnline CSS Generator ScriptomizersA CSS stylesheet generator CSS CreatorLive CSS Cascading Style Sheet Layout generator for your web site CSS HTML PHP Website Template MakerThis PHP – HTML – CSS template generator creates a two column layout with both a header and a footer…. CSS Rounded Box Generatorgenerates html and css for rounded corner boxes Listamaticnot a tool but very useful! – one list, many options – Using CSS and a simple list to create radically different list Listamatic2nested list options List-O-MaticGenerate CSS-styled navigation menus based on list items List-O-Rama!Dreamweaver MX and UltraDev Zone – List-O-Rama will allow you to generate nice CSS inline menus in seconds CSS Menu GeneratorCSS Menu Generator will generate both the CSS and the HTML code required to produce a text-based yet appealing set of navigation buttons.

Benefits of CSS

As discussed, CSS makes it easy for you to separate the style and layout of your HTML files from their informational content. This means you can determine the look of your site in one file, and change the whole site by modifying that single file. It also means you can make your HTML changes by accessing one file.

This structure provided by CSS also means that you can work with your web pages so that they look good on any browser. For example, a page on Mozilla can look very different than a page seen on internet explorer. CSS eliminates that difference.

CSS gives you more control over how your pages look because it is a more detailed mechanism than HTML. HTML wasn’t designed for style, it was designed for document structure. CSS was designed for style. This means it is easier for you as a business owner seeking brand development and recognition to define your “look” and give it a unique and consistent feel.

Users say that CSS also prints better than HTML documents. Important if visitors are accessing your content, which they hopefully are, printing it, and taking it with them or better yet – sharing it with their friends and associates. Additionally, the pages allow visitors to print the entire page as opposed to the partial pages that HTML often prints.

CSS decreases your page size significantly, making it easier for your visitors to load your site and all relevant graphics and copy. It also means that your web pages can be seen quickly and clearly with handheld browsers. This is huge because many people are now surfing the internet on their cell phones, smart phones, and PDAs. If your site doesn’t load quickly, chances are people are going to leave. If your site is quickly and clearly accessible – you may have a new customer! Additionally, it will take up less space on your server if you’re running close to your limit – and save you less money if you’re being charge by bandwidth. This is because CSS requires less code.

CSS enables you to position the code for your content at the top making your page search engine friendly. Properly marked up, HTML pages can easily found and properly categorized by search engines.

It is also fairly easy for anyone to learn because CSS already uses well-known coding elements and principals.

The benefits of CSS include making your web site:

• Faster to create

• Easier to maintain or change

• More adaptable to fit new and emerging technologies

• Compact

• Neater and cleaner in the HTML code

How do I use CSS?

Cascading Style Sheets can be used in two ways – internally or externally. When used internally the CSS code is placed within the ‘head’ tags of each HTML file. The HTML code basically looks just like this:

@import url(Path to stylesheet.css)

Note: [Remove all spaces before > and after < and / ]

So what method do you choose? That depends on what you need. For example, internal is used when a designer needs to style only one page, or different pages with different styles. Web page designers tend to prefer an external cascading style sheet. This is because, as noted earlier in the benefits list, you will only need to edit one CSS file to change the entire website. Webmasters also find external is better because they are easier to maintain, they’re more compact, and generally the appearance is easier to control and stylize.

Potential Concerns

Not all browsers can read CSS. This is a real concern; however, the percentage has decreased to the point where less than 1% of browsers are affected. What sites are affected? Older browser versions, created before CSS was standard, including Netscape 4.0. Because the vast majority of browsers are significantly newer than this, and because the World Wide Web Consortium has recommended the use of CSS, making it a widely acceptable and recognizable mechanism around the world, all concerns about using CSS are negligible.

Bottom Line

CSS is a tool that will make your web pages easier to organize and maintain, your website easier to change, your brand potentially stronger, your website more compact and easier to load, your search engine optimization will improve, oh and your pages will just look better. There really isn’t a reason to not experiment with CSS and integrate it into your web site. Once you begin using and designing with CSS, you’ll likely find building sites is more fun, faster, and they look amazing.

Website development companies earlier used simple HTML to design their websites. However, they felt the need for some advanced tool when certain design changes had to be made in all the pages of the site. Later on, the CSS – Cascading Style Sheets was introduced to get rid of the exasperating task of making changes to each HTML document. CSS web design makes work easier by effectively formatting the HTML pages.

Before the introduction of CSS web design, to characterize fonts, headers, paragraphs and tables, separate HTML tags were used. However, with the use of more and more HTML tags for the formatting structures, it became difficult for the website development company to monitor the content, and appearance of the website. Today, CSS has made it simple by allowing the developers to format the content of more pages at a time. In addition, many new versions of the CSS are evolving after every few days, and the companies are taking advantage of the additional benefits by adapting the updated version.

Visual presentation of all the pages of the website can be placed in one CSS file, due to which changes can be effectively made to all the pages. Editing the CSS pages in future is also easy, as these sheets provide more control to the designers over the entire site. Furthermore, CSS web design saves bandwidth by diminishing the amount of code in HTML pages.

Another advantage of the CSS web design is the control that these sheets grant to the designer over the look and content of the website. CSS comes with a wide variety of stylistic facilities to meet the needs of developers. They can create attractive pages by using the different tools of CSS. As every site demands thoughtful appearance, the difference in its design can be brought with the help of CSS. However, the developers should understand the browsers attribute, and impact of web designs before proceeding with the designing of websites for businesses.

www.lokeepro.com The second video in my video tutorial series, this video picks up where “Getting Started (video 1)” leaves off. In this video I will create a simple CSS layout using DIV tags, and quickly styling it with background images made in photoshop. This Lesson we will -Create an index.html Page -Create layout.css file -Create background images for Body, Header, Nav, Content, and Footer -Create an HTML / CSS layout with Header, Navigation, Content, and Footer **Pause as needed I …

What is CSS ?

CSS or Cascading Style Sheets is a great tool to add a unique look to your web pages.  CSS enhances fonts, colors, and even the spacing of your web pages.  It is a useful tool to let you separate your HTML content from your style. For example, you can use your HTML file to create and organize the content, but all of the visual presentation including the background, fonts, colors, link effects, text formatting, and spacing are created with a CSS file.

Benefits of CSS

As discussed, CSS makes it easy for you to separate the style and layout of your HTML files from their informational content.  This means you can determine the look of your site in one file, and change the whole site by modifying that single file. It also means you can make your HTML changes by accessing one file.

This structure provided by CSS also means that you can work with your web pages so that they look good on any browser.  For example, a page on Mozilla can look very different than a page seen on internet explorer.  CSS eliminates that difference.

CSS gives you more control over how your pages look because it is a more detailed mechanism than HTML.  HTML wasn’t designed for style, it was designed for document structure.  CSS was designed for style.  This means it is easier for you as a business owner seeking brand development and recognition to define your “look” and give it a unique and consistent feel.

Users say that CSS also prints better than HTML documents.  Important if visitors are accessing your content, which they hopefully are, printing it, and taking it with them or better yet – sharing it with their friends and associates.  Additionally, the pages allow visitors to print the entire page as opposed to the partial pages that HTML often prints.

CSS decreases your page size significantly, making it easier for your visitors to load your site and all relevant graphics and copy.  It also means that your web pages can be seen quickly and clearly with handheld browsers.  This is huge because many people are now surfing the internet on their cell phones, smart phones, and PDAs.  If your site doesn’t load quickly, chances are people are going to leave.  If your site is quickly and clearly accessible – you may have a new customer!  Additionally, it will take up less space on your server if you’re running close to your limit – and save you less money if you’re being charge by bandwidth.  This is because CSS requires less code.

CSS enables you to position the code for your content at the top making your page search engine friendly. Properly marked up, HTML pages can easily found and properly categorized by search engines.

It is also fairly easy for anyone to learn because CSS already uses well-known coding elements and principals.

The benefits of CSS include making your web site:

• Faster to create

• Easier to maintain or change

• More adaptable to fit new and emerging technologies

• Compact

• Neater and cleaner in the HTML code

How do I use CSS ?

Cascading Style Sheets can be used in two ways – internally or externally. When used internally the CSS code is placed within the ‘head’ tags of each HTML file. The HTML code basically looks just like this:

2. Using the @import method, appearing as:

@import url(Path to stylesheet.css)

So what method do you choose?  That depends on what you need.  For example, internal is used when a designer needs to style only one page, or different pages with different styles.  Web page designers tend to prefer an external cascading style sheet. This is because, as noted earlier in the benefits list, you will only need to edit one CSS file to change the entire website. Webmasters also find external is better because they are easier to maintain, they’re more compact, and generally the appearance is easier to control and stylize.

Potential Concerns

Not all browsers can read CSS.  This is a real concern; however, the percentage has decreased to the point where less than 1% of browsers are affected.  What sites are affected?  Older browser versions, created before CSS was standard, including Netscape 4.0.  Because the vast majority of browsers are significantly newer than this, and because the World Wide Web Consortium has recommended the use of CSS, making it a widely acceptable and recognizable mechanism around the world, all concerns about using CSS are negligible.

Bottom Line

CSS is a tool that will make your web pages easier to organize and maintain, your website easier to change, your brand potentially stronger, your website more compact and easier to load, your search engine optimization will improve, oh and your pages will just look better.  There really isn’t a reason to not experiment with CSS and integrate it into your web site.  Once you begin using and designing with  CSS, you’ll likely find building sites is more fun, faster, and they look amazing.

Drupal is an award winning open source Content Management System based on PHP/MySQL. Its power and flexibility combined with its exceptional design mean it is one of the most popular choices for creating a CMS website. Drupal employs a specialized templating system and supports themes, which allow you to change the look and feel of the system’s front and back-end interfaces.

Drupal 6 Themes is an ideal introduction to theming with Drupal 6. If you want to create a striking new look for your Drupal 6 website, this book is for you. This book is a revised, updated and expanded edition of Drupal 5 Themes, written specifically for Drupal 6. The book will show you techniques and tools to help you improve the look and feel of any Drupal 6-powered website

Starting from the basics of theme setup and configuration, you will learn about the Drupal theming architecture and the PHPTemplate engine, and then move on to modifying existing themes and building new themes from scratch. You will find out about tools to make your theme development easier, and also find invaluable information about under-documented elements of the theming system.

This book helps you understand the logic behind the theming system employed in Drupal, and how to make it work for you. You will learn key concepts and work through examples with careful, step-by-step instructions.

The main requirements to make use of this book are knowledge of HTML, CSS, and a touch of creativity – you don’t need to know anything about theming in Drupal, although you should be familiar with the basic operation of the Drupal system. Although this book aims to make Drupal theming accessible to designers, theming in Drupal 6 involves writing some PHP code, and a basic knowledge of PHP will be helpful. Regardless of your technical skills, this book will teach you to design themes for your Drupal websites in the easiest way. You can read more about the book here: http://www.packtpub.com/drupal-6-themes/book

So all of us who have worked on websites before, or even have just browsed the net, have come across something called CSS. If you’re familiar with HTML at all, you’ve definitely heard the term. With the way that the internet works, there’s always a new update to the way that websites are coded and structured. CSS is a fairly new addition to website programmer’s tool box. Today we will be going over the language the history of and the pros of using CSS.

What is CSS?

Cascading Style Sheets, CSS, is a coding language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML. CSS is used by both the authors of web pages to control colors, fonts, layout, and other web page properties. It is used mainly to separate website structure from website content. This improves accessibility, flexibility and control of content presentation.

CSS History

Style sheets have existed since the beginnings of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) in the 70’s. Cascading Style Sheets were developed for creating a consistent approach to providing visual presentation information for web documents. As HTML developed over time, it evolved to include a variety of stylistic capabilities for web developers. This gave designers more control over site appearance but also made HTML more complex to write and maintain. Web browser variations made consistency difficult, and web surfers had barely any control over how web pages were displayed. The W3C began working on a new way to control visual presentation of web content. Out of 9 different proposed style sheet languages, CSS grew from two of the 9, Cascading HTML Style Sheets (CHSS) and Stream-based Style Sheet Proposal (SSP). As work was done on the development of these two languages, CHSS took over, and eventually the H was dropped as these style sheets could be used with other markup languages. CSS1 specification was completed in 1996 and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 3 was released with limited support for CSS. In 2000, IE 5 was released, with full CSS support. Right now, most browsers support CSS; Including Mozilla FireFox, Internet Explorer, and Netscape Navigator. There are a few discrepancies in how each browser interprets certain CSS properties, but these have been solved with CSS hacks, workarounds, and CSS filters in order to obtain consistent results across web browsers.

Pros

Some of the advantages of using CSS are:

• Visual presentation information for an entire website can be held in one CSS file, which allows for changes to be made cross-site quickly.

• Different users can have different style sheets.

• The document’s code is reduced in size, since it does not need to contain any code pertaining to the visual presentation of content.

• Pages using CSS are easier to edit in the future.

By no means is this a full explanation of CSS, as that would take many articles to fully explain. But I hope that this article explains a little bit about CSS, how it has developed, and some of the pros of using it.