CSS a Great Optimization Tool

By Charles Nixon III
Posted Friday, September 17, 2004

What is CSS? CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. It is a webdesign language that is used to increase the look and feel of your website. It can be of great use when you are optimizing your website for search engines. Search Engines go through your website as fast as they can. So usually its better to have less code and more content. CSS allows you to use simple tags in your code and have high effects.

There are three forms of CSS. They are:
- Inline
- Embeded
- External

Inline
------
Inline CSS is used in the body of your webpage. Inline CSS is good to use to disallow the effect of External or Embeded CSS. I don't recommend using a lot of inline CSS but it comes in handy sometimes.

Example:
h1 style="font: 16pt"Using Inline CSS/h1 p style="font:8pt"CSS is a very simple tool to implement to any website./p

Embeded
-------
Embeded CSS is used within the document again, but it is built in the heading of your website. This type of CSS is great for when you have a one-page website. Embeded CSS is a great way to start testing how powerful CSS can be. Some simple code at the head of your page can eliminate the use of B, I, U, and FONT tags.

Example:
html
head
style type="text/css"
!--
body
{color : blue ;
background : grey;}
p
{font-family: arial;}
--
/style
/head
body
p This font will be in "arial" and it will be blue with a grey background. /p /body
/html

External
--------
External CSS is used the most in webdesign. External CSS is kept in a text file within your website. The best thing about External CSS is that you can have all of your pages within your website linking to this one CSS document. So that you don't have to go back to each page to make changes

Example of the HTML document calling on External CSS:
html
head
titleExternal CSS/title
link rel="stylesheet" href="external.css" type="text/css" //head

Example of a External CSS document
body
{color : blue ;
background : grey;}
p
{font-family: arial;}
UL {font-weight: bold;
text-decoration: none;
color: pink;}

An external CSS document is just a blank file that contains all of your CSS commands.

So, what are you waiting for? Get out there and try out this easy language!

About the Author
Charles Nixon - Website Designer. Driven by Creativity. Building websites to increase sales, and web presence. Did you start your business to create a website? Or to run your business?

CharlesNixon.com may be the web design firm for you! Competitive prices and your project delivered on time and on budget.

(http://www.CharlesNixon.com/)
mailto:Charles@CharlesNixon.com