CSS what is it and do I need it?
Cascading Style Sheets or (CSS) works alongside Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). HTML is the code that tells a browser how to display a web page. Previously in HTML you had to code every row to describe the fonts, backgrounds, positioning etc.
CSS allows you to to state how the layout of the site will look, ensure uniformity across different pages, and it allows your web page to download quicker, helping to make sure that your potential new customers don’t get bored and go find someone else’s site.
CSS code can be on either a separate document, written in the header of the HTML web page, or even written inline with the HTML code. depending on what you need that bit of code to affect.
At it’s most basic you can code CSS to make all your text written in H1 the largest title tag across your site to be written in red, bold and in Arial.
CSS code can be used to arrange the layout of the page. It can create areas on the page for the text to be displayed in columns or blocks, or it can be used to position and stack images.
Linking your regular HTML pages to a separate CSS document makes it easy to change presentation, layout and general appearance of all linked pages very quickly. You need only to make the changes on the one document, not every page on the site.
Do I need it? Well it depends on you and how user friendly you want your site to be behind the scenes. It is still possible to code a site purely in HTML, but this takes a lot longer as you can imagine having to describe how every line of text looks. CSS reduces the initial time it takes to code the the site but also makes re-designing sites or making changes to the whole site a lot quicker and more efficient. Most sites these days will be designed using CSS and HTML, but if you’re getting someone else to create your site, it is always worth checking.
Setting the prices to charge.
Well the task of the last few days has been to try and establish my price list for Pippas Web. This is harder than I thought. My target audience is sole traders, probably just starting out not making mega amounts of money, but wanting a website. They’re not technically minded and therefore have no interest in designing the site themselves. Also as I’m self taught and continually learning new skills I feel bad charging too much. But then if I want to do Pippas web instead of going back to work, then I need to be making enough money. Especially as it looks like a move to Stafford is now likely.
As I offer both HTML coded sites and Flash templated sites, I needed to do this twice over. Flash site are easier to complete so I decided to charge a slightly lower amount for those sites.
I’ve also seen some people taking the mickey in my humble opinion charging £50 just for handing over the password for a Flash templated site using the same site as I do. Where in actuality if the customer wanted they could have set it all up themselves for free.
Well the price list is now set. Once the site and blog goes live, then I can see if I’ve priced too high or too low.
Designing My Own Site
Well I thought I ought to start documenting the development of my site Pippas web as this was the purpose of adding a blog to the site.
I’ve been working on trying to get the layout right before finalising the content. I decided to use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), which was a bit of a challenge for me as I’d not used them before, but that is how I learn. I decide to do something, then have to work out how to do it.
So far I’ve gone from having a plain background to having a picture background with fixed width site then I know that most people will see the site the same way. I’ve had to learn how to make small flash movies for the side of the site, how to use CSS and a crash course in how to edit images using Paint.net . Not to mention joining up to twitter. No wonder every time I go on the computer just to do a little tweaking it takes me hours.
