CSS is Cascading Style Sheets which is used to format elements in an HTML document. At the end of this tutorial you should be able to make a basic full CSS website without using HTML table tags.
Anybody who will go through this tutorial must have some working knowledge of HTML since that will not be discussed here in the tutorial.
[ top of page ]
This tutorial will only talk about is how to build a website in full CSS. Although there are very many reasons why full CSS websites are better than websites made with tables, I will not discuss the advantages of CSS over tables nor will I go into definitions and historical backgrounds to save up on time. Most probably the person reading this right now is also a web designer or web developer like me, so I guess you should know the definitions and advantages already. If not, you can search online for other academic knowledge you want to find out.
There is a lot of topics on making full CSS websites, and if I discuss them all, that would take forever. My objective is just to cover the basics to get you started.
[ top of page ]
To be able to demonstrate how to make a CSS site, I need a site to show every step of the way how I made it. So I made this very simple site where you are reading the content right now. This site will have the tutorial on how to make a single page of this website layout. Starting with a single Photoshop® file layout, how it was sliced it and put it together as this website.
As I show each step, I might or might have not explained why I did things in a certain way. It really depends on my mood to write that time. *lol* If I'm was in the mood, I might have explain everything thoroughly, if not, at least you still see how to do it and possibly still learn from this tutorial.
[ top of page ]
There are a hundred ways to skin a cat. The way I do things are based on my experience on improving how I build websites. I started building websites in 1997 for various companies and has been a hardcore tables person for many years.
My CSS builds started January 2005 and the way I did it at the start, I thought was really good. Then after a few days you learn something new and say: I should have done it this way. Now you think your work is perfect, then someone tells me: Hey, it will be better if you do this instead. And you realize again that there is a better way to do it.
Now back to the question, am I teaching the right way? The answer is I really don't know. For now, this is the right way for me, and almost every month, I come up with a new way to do things that is better than how I used to do it. I basically create websites everyday, on many occassions, some sites are rush assignments and the way I make my sites are optimized for faster building and scalability.
A site that does not scale is time-consuming to fix in the future when the client adds or removes content. If you have tons of clients, this is a main issue, so you would find all ways to do everything faster. And the way I do it is with heavy CSS and PHP. But I am not talking about PHP here, totally another topic. This will only deal with CSS.
[ top of page ]