Beginning CSS

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and what it does is allow you to quickly and easily format all the small details of how the contents of your web page will appear. The codes used in CSS for formatting your web page differs from regular HTML code, but they are just as easy to understand. Also, when you want to add multiple CSS codes to certain elements on your web site, you need to separate each code with a semicolon.

To start off, lets talk about giving a name to those tags and elements that we've been using so far. There are two ways in which you can do this.

Example of using an identifier with a paragraph tag:
<p id="important paragraph">

Example of using a class with a paragraph tag:
<p class="important paragraph">

*Note: No two items can have the same id name, but multiple items can have the same class name.

What you're essentially doing here is marking a paragraph tag (or any other tag or element that you choose) so that if you ever wanted to increase the font size, change font color, make all the text in this paragraph bold/italic, or editing anything within the paragraph, you only need to edit the class called "important paragraph" (or whatever name that you gave).


Dividing Your Page Into Divisions

The division tag is <div> and you close it using </div>. Whatever goes in between the opening and closing division tag can be considered as a chunk of your web page.

So knowing this, you could give your division element an identifier name or a class name and then whenever you need to edit the contents in that particular division element, you just need to make changes to it's corresponding class or identifier.
Example:

<div class="first class">

</div>

Next: CSS Style Sheets