Go Ahead in Web Designing by Mastering in CSS
CSS is a powerful and necessary tool for designing websites. This dominant web designing tool gives the ability to control each and every aspect of a web page such as – text font, text styles, margins, colors, line heights and many more. There are numerous ways to cascading styles in the document. The first and easiest one is to use the STYLE tag to define styles which appear elsewhere. CSS is no longer an emerging technology as it is being used for more and more websites. It has become a standard for designing creative websites in today’s competitive industry. Whether you are a beginner or hardcore developer, you should be familiar with the rules and guidelines of the language.
CSS can be said as a bridge between design and programming, and there are numerous features in CSS that allow for an explosion of creative web designing. The latest version of CSS includes a variety of properties that allow designers to style the HTML elements with color gradients, drop shadows, rounded corners, etc. The upcoming CSS specifications help you to design creative websites, but, you cannot use these on day to day projects. These features can help you to push the boundaries of modern web designing and add extra spice to your design.
Advanced CSS animator
With advanced animator, designers can animate any CSS property virtually. Designers can apply a variety of CSS transformations such as – borders, font sizes, colors, opacity, rotate, skew, zoom, and many more. One can even choose from ready animations such as – expand, fade, collapse, paper spin, blink, shake or even save new presets in CSS animations. The key features of CSS animations include-
- Animations are completely based on CSS
- Any CSS property can be animated virtually
- Transformation in complete visual form
- Ability to apply effects with ease
- Use of CSS transitions and animate multiple elements
- Make animations out of the box in a quick and easy way
- Customizable animations
- Dreamweaver integration
Images for a variety of design effects
Images play a very important role in web designing. One can design everything from stylish text logos to beautiful backgrounds, drop shadows, round corners etc. Images provide a variety of design effects that take the website to a great height. The main drawback of images is that they come with a cost. One can make use of images rather than content. This detracts from search engine results and add lines of unnecessary coding. Images are even incapable of rendering on different devices. To use these images in an effective manner, CSS provides a variety of features that allow you to –
- Make the corners round
- To resize the rounded corner boxes and tables, one can make use of the sliding door technique in CSS
- Add a simple shadow to the image
- Relative polishing to tackle sophisticated drop shadow techniques
- Image replacement techniques to position logos
Link styling in CSS
Web designers often face the problem of working with hyperlink in CSS. There are multiple dimensions of complication that is already overloaded in its usage. A CSS developer can capitalize the selection to differentiate different links and fashion buttons and eliminate redundant code. The key features of link styling in CSS are-
- Ability to arrange link states in order to avoid browser incompatibility
- Notify the users in case of any external email or link
- Ability to manipulate the text in such a way that it looks like a button
- Demark different sections of the page with proper links
Print friendly style sheets
Designing print friendly web page is one of the essentials of today’s business industry. Most of the business owners want their web pages in printable form. Developers can design, print friendly websites using CSS, where the pages are free of background colors, ad banners, columns and images that make the page awkward to print. Using CSS, developers will not have the need to design separate pages for browsing and printing. With CSS, one can practically energize excessive code into a single file, leaving the page simple and clean. They can reference to different style sheets from a single HTML. The key features of CSS style sheets include-
- Allow designers to designate a separate print style for each and every web page
- Provides print-friendly backgrounds and colors
- Allow you to hide some elements in print version
- Allows units of measurement that are appropriate for printing
Apart from the above said features, there are numerous others that help designers take their web designing skills to greater heights. CSS makes it very easy to change the style and layout of a document. Reduced file size is another important feature of CSS. The CSS file can be downloaded just once by the visitor and re-used for different web pages. This reduces the huge requirement of bandwidth for server and ensures faster download. Separate styling from content makes it easier for visitors to view or modify the content without disturbing the position of the images. The use of CSS meets a number of difficulties and offers a lot more than any other tool in the market today.
When designers incorporate CSS into web design, they discover that search engines are easily locating the web pages. The reason behind this is the simple and clear-cut coding technique. Search engines will no longer have to struggle to trace the content of your website. You will be happy to know that CSS will not only enhance the look of your website, but saves a lot of time and money. CSS has become the preferred tool for hardcore as well as aspiring web designers today.
Author Bio – David Smith is a freelance web designer and has a strong portfolio. He is providing web services at competitive rates. According to him, CSS is highly beneficial for a website and can help your business generate a lot of revenue. Visit our blog to know more about the author and his contribution in web designing.