Cascading Style Sheets

It sounds like an advertisement for really expensive bed linen, but CSS is actually an Internet language used in conjunction with HTML to make web pages. Specifically, CSS controls how things look on a page. It controls the layout, backgrounds, fonts, styles — just about anything that has to do with the appearance of the page can be specified using CSS.

Back in B.C.S.S.

Before CSS, all style information had to be coded into every single page of a website. If you wanted to make changes you had to change every single page. That increased the file size of pages, it increased the cost of changing website styles, it slowed down page transfers due to inefficiency — it was not a good situation.

CSS is The Solution

As usual, some intrepid developers figured that styles common to the entire website could be stored into a single document and referred to by each page as it loads. Changing styles became easy — just change the single CSS document and every page changes to reflect the alterations. For this alone, CSS was one of the most important developments in web design. Add in the savings in file size and performance improvements in download speed for web pages and you had a language that was instantly being used by nearly every web designer.

CSS3 — The Third Part of the Trilogy

CSS is constantly being improved. At this time, version 3 is in ongoing development and introduces “modules” separated into specific aspects of web page design. We make use of the CSS modules that are accepted by the majority of web browsers so that your pages can incorporate the best in design technology. We also recognize, however, that not everyone is constantly up-to-date, so your website will use “graceful degradation,” which is a fancy way to say that if they can’t see CSS3 features, they’ll still see something that looks good.

And Looking Good Is What CSS Is All About

Which leads us to the topic of responsive design. If you wondered how we make websites that respond to the size of the monitor, it’s chiefly through CSS. The style sheet can be designed with multiple formats so that whether a browser is in landscape or page view, giant size or cell phone, your pages look great and perform flawlessly. So no matter what demands are placed on your site, you can rest easy — we use cascading style sheets!