Just about everyone who has ever been involved with or looked into website development will have heard of CSS. For those who don’t know, CSS stands for ‘Cascading Style Sheet’. I’ll explain a little more about what exactly it does in the next paragraph.
What is it for?
CSS can be used to do countless things to websites. Mostly it is used to add styling such as coloring and shaping elements however it can also be used to add functionality to a website such as a working menu bar. Making sure a website has the right color and formatting is essential in these days of dynamic and expressive websites. There are several versions of CSS styling, each version adding more customization and options than the last. The latest version is CSS3.
Ultimately if you want a website to look impressive and modern you will need to use CSS.
How to use it
So your next question might be how do I use this? The first step to take would be to get a text editor that offers syntax highlighting for CSS. My software of choice is notepad++ which is freely available from the website here.
Once you have the editor installed, open it up and we’ll create our first CSS file. Below is a screenshot of how to set the syntax highlighting to CSS mode.
To create a new CSS file I’m going to put a really simple rule in and save the file, Notepad++ should automatically set the extension if you remembered to set the language to CSS.