Originally posted by Mustang-man
Thanks a lot, that's just what i was hoping someone would reply with. 
Is there any page building programme which uses CSS instead of HTML? I use Frontpage Express (old) to do all my sites as i don't know much code. 
Which is also why i don't have my own poll set up - i use one from HTML Gear because i could never get my one working.
Okay. A website needs to be coded in a markup language. HTML is a markup language. CSS is not a markup language. You code your website using a markup language (such as HTML or XHTML) and incorporate your CSS into. Cascading Style Sheets are mainly used to add pretty effects to your webpage and make updating easy. Think of it like a cake. The HTML is the main bit of you cake and CSS is the icing. I suggest you check out
http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp
Here is what I mean by incorporating your CSS into HTML.
This is my CSS style sheet (stylesheet.css).
In my style sheet I have defined how I would like my text to be displayed on my website. Where you see .text is the CSS selector, which is what your HTML file will look for. Anyway, I want my font to be Verdana, 8pt, bold and blue.
That's all good and fine, but my HTML doesn't know there is a CSS stylesheet even there. You must first link your entire stylesheet to your HTML by adding a
<link href="yourstylesheethere.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> between your <head></head> tags. Now our HTML knows that there is CSS style sheet there.
So, now all that is left is to tell the HTML to use the style sheet. You'll notice I have added a
class attribute to my <p> tag. Between the two quotes (" ") I have the words text. If you go back to second picture, in my CSS I named the selector .text.
class="text" tells the browser to look in our CSS style sheet for a selector called .text and display it's corresponding values. So, if you called your selector .bob in your CSS, you will need to type class="bob" to display it.
If you have done everything correctly, save your HTML file and open it up. Our text is Verdana, 8pt, bold and blue all without <font> tags! Now, say I want to change the colour from blue to red. All I have to do is go into my CSS stylesheet and change the
color: #0000FF; to
color: #FF0000; and my text will automatically change from blue to red.
There is a bunch of other stuff you can do with CSS like defining backgrounds, positioning, borders, and the list goes on. But, explaining that took long enough.
As for Web Authoring programs, any recent programs should support CSS. I used Dreamweaver MX for that short tutorial. Or, you can always code it yourself in Notepad...
... Other browsers support it much better). However, for the design part of your page (as in, background color, link colors, text colors, table row/data background images, etc.), you should definitely move to CSS 1.
