CSS Design for change  

While you may well have read many articles on CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and you may have grasped the basics for including a little bit of style using the raw code, but you are still lacking the techniques needed to fully implement a design that you have scribbled on a beer mat.

So how do you go about getting the scribble into a working CSS design?

One way is to outsource your scribble to a graphic designer, who will transform it into a useable digital image, then all you have to do is rearrange a few divs here and there.

Another way is to give it your best effort using all the free stock images you can find across the net, or even scan your CSS design, preferably to a manageble size for layout purposes.

How do you implement the newly created design into those div tags?

If you have grasped CSS thus far you will know that an external CSS file will manage your whole website, simply by using one single line of code within your CSS file you can implement your new design using;

background: url("pathtoyourimage/whateveryourimageisnamed.gif") no-repeat center;

This single line can be used with different images throughout your page design, all you have to do is shuffle the divs around a bit using the margin attributes.

Before long you will be creating jaw dropping CSS Designs all from a scribble on a beer mat!

Recent article: CSS Articles
CSS Content? Using tables within the content of your page is a major no-no, the whole intent and purpose of CSS is to control the style of your page elements, this is done using an external stylesheet.

An external Stylesheet? External stylesheets give you the control of your whole website from one single file rather than trying to edit your whole websites CSS using global search and replace or by opening each page individually.

If you are new to this HTML malarkey then welcome, you have just embarked upon a new learning curve that does not take too long to master. Before the invention of CSS everything within a webpage used to be designed using tables.

Indeed there are still a lot of html editors out there that still use tables to format a pages content, one strong word of advice, get rid of that software and start again. Tables are not extinct within webpages but they should only be used for the purpose of presenting data.

Beginning CSS? I am not going to use this article to give you a whole list of tags and how to apply them, that information would be too easily ignored. There are thousands of well rounded websites available on the net today that can walk you through the first stages of CSS, the one I would recommend would be: W3Schools CSS intro this is a perfect place to start learning CSS, in the interests of parity and fairness I will also recommend What can be achieved using CSS .