CSS Introduction

Chapter 1 3 mins

Learning outcomes:

  1. What is CSS
  2. Significance of CSS

What is CSS?

CSS or Cascading Style Sheets, is a language designed for styling web pages. It adds beauty and colors to a website and is responsible for turning plain, monotonous HTML into some stunning design which you usually see on different sites across the internet.

Not to be confused with a programming language, it is only a language used to style HTML pages.

CSS has a great potential. It comes with, literally, a ton full of style properties that define different aspects in the designing of a web page, for example the fonts, the colors, the layout etc. There is so much to it that going above 200 lines in writing CSS is not any surprising.

These days technologies have improved and so are ones utilizing CSS - now we have online editors that play the role of writing CSS for you. As you drag and drop things the program is doing some sort of CSS coding on the backend and which you might not even have known!

Designing in editors is fun, but learning CSS is more fun since you understand two things - how CSS works and, may be, even how the editor program works. CSS is undoubtedly an easy-to-learn language. It has a lot of concepts to cover but all of them are so simple that the long CSS trek seems short.

Significance of CSS

Knowing what is CSS isn't enought in knowing why is CSS so amazing - to answer this you have to also know what is the importance of CSS which we will discuss now.

These days when designing is on such high summits, it is very unlikely that users will love a website which doesn't has the design layer present in it. Just go on to Google, type web designs and an array full of spectacular master pieces will appear. If your website is built without CSS, or with poor CSS, then it means that you are way behind the trends of today's web development era and this will only lead to your business not flourishing or even declining.

Let's give you a simple example...

You own a website selling products online. It has good content written for the products and has good development on the back-end. However it doesn't has CSS in it, or for that matter has CSS but not a carefully planned one. What will happen?

A user comes to your website, and immediately sees the poor design it has got. He presses the back button and will in almost all cases never want to visit it again. Yes you may have a secure online store, with everything in it but CSS and that will be enough to make a user feel uncomfortable. He may think your website is malicious, somehow! Who will pay on a website where there is no style!

This will lead to lower sale graphs and consequently your business declining sooner or later! It's a long story but one which will happen if CSS is not present in your class.

But remember...

CSS is just a part of web designing. If you know CSS, it doesn't necessarily mean that you will make flawless, appealing designs or that know about good web designing. Web designing is a whole world full of small regions to discover - CSS is just a part of it.

Other regions include accessibility, typography, visual hierarchy, user interactibility and so on. CSS can be called learn-in-one-day but designing is not even close to a month. It will take years for you to accel your skills in building master pieces on the net, but you can definitely cut this time frame by learning designing today in the right way.