CSS Advice requested

[carowan]

Hi.

I am new to the formums, (and webdesign) and am interested in upgrading my 15 page website to use CSS. How difficult is this to do globally? does each page have to be modified indivicually?
I am very intersted in adding more content for my customers and for SEO, and thought it might be better to do it now than wait.

(Im not sure if I can list my site address address as I have under 10 posts)

Thanks for any pointers. :)
Charlie

[TwisterMc]

CSS is AWESOME!! My site is all run off one CSS file twistermc.com also chatfieldmn.com and it works great. You'll have to change most of the pages over though, but once you get it implemented it's great!!

Be warned though, IE and CSS don't play well together. IE doesn't fully support some features.

[expat]

Hi,

well css will help to "slim" down your pages.
You don't have to change all pages at once - you can start with one page and keep adding css functionality whilst you go through the pages.

As said before start with general css which is supported by all bowsers - avoid too advanced functionality as this will require browser detection.

There are great tutorials out just scan for css tutorial.

Best of luck
M

[North Carolina SEO]

Implementing CSS across your site can improve consistency throughout and makes for a nice way to implement some changes in one place "ripple" throughout. Yes, it does require initially changing the existing pages but, can be well worth your time and trouble. I currently have multiple sites that are constantly viewed with IE and use CSS on each.

There are plenty of folks in these forums who are quite adept at CSS and could offer suggestions as you get deeper into this. I will be glad to provide pointers if needed.

As expat suggested, there are a number of sites with beginner to intermediate tutorials about CSS. Just scan a bit and you should be able to get started just fine.

[Lever]

Hey carowan,

Go for it; get acquainted with simple CSS to start with and take a look at some of the things that can be done. Razvan Pop's site in this thread (http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=779) sparked me into taking a step back from my 6 years of HTML coding and looking at CSS in a fresh light. I've always used CSS to define my sites' text elements but I now realise there's much more to it than that...

As TwisterMC says, CSS is awesome; it's all about separating style from content, so for some inspiration you might also like to see Eric Meyer's CSS work (http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/) pages (in particular the Complex Spiral Distorted (http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/complexspiral/glassy.html)) and the most excellent CSS Zen Garden (http://www.csszengarden.com/) (select a design - same content, different stylesheet).

Best of Luck ;)

[Foxy]

You should be aware that some browsers [early, and not too early at that] do not read CSS well, and, as some large proportion of the population are still on them it would be, in my view, a little hasty to throw out tables if that is your market - if your market is up to date people then it doesn't matter.

So what we have done is kept the tables and placed CSS over the top to achieve some style advantages and where we deduce that the market is more sophisticated [read up to date with browsers] we are creating tableless.

But it is the way to go - I only wish we could go there quicker :)

[TwisterMc]

For browser issues, use JS to determin what they are using, then determin teh style sheet. That's what i had to do for my Chatfield (http://www.chatfieldmn.com) site. Looks slightly different in IE vs all other browsers.

[Foxy]

For browser issues, use JS to determin what they are using, then determin teh style sheet. That's what i had to do for my Chatfield (http://www.chatfieldmn.com) site. Looks slightly different in IE vs all other browsers.

Did you mean Windows, rather than widows, in your script here:

var isMac = 0;
var isWin = 0;
var isOtherOS=0;
if (navigator.appVersion.indexOf('Mac') != -1) {isMac=1;}
else {
if (navigator.appVersion.indexOf('Win') != -1) {isWin=1;}
else {isOtherOS =1;}
}

//if(isWin) {document.write('widows');}
//else {document.write('you are safe');}

if (navigator.appName.indexOf('Internet') != -1) {document.write('<link href="styleWindows.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">');}
else {document.write('<link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">');}

[TwisterMc]

He he. You are right. Either way it's looking for 'Internet' Explorer, not windows. ;) I used a different code to piece the above code together. Actually 1/2 that code isn't even doing anything. I was gonna have it so it found IE on a PC but never got around to it. Work great this way too. :)

[Arnica]

CSS is definitely the way to go if only to get rid of numerous <table> tags just to structure the page. Maintains W3C standards compliance and so degrades gracefully on older browsers to boot. Most of the IE issues can be avoided without too much trickery and it makes makes site revamps easy. Check out http://css.maxdesign.com.au/ as well.

Mick

[TwisterMc]

Check out http://css.maxdesign.com.au/ as well.

Bookmarked.... i need to learn more about floats. :)