FrontPage Tips by Ward Cameron Enterprises
Take Your Web Site to New Levels

Format Your FrontPage Web Pages Using the Power of Cascading Style Sheets

As you create your web page, you use a variety of formatting styles to give your page its unique appearance. You will quickly become familiar with the body style along with the various heading styles that are an integral part of the web page theme that you've selected. These serve to make your text stand out by breaking your page into sections divided by headings.

You can format each of these body and heading styles by selecting the text and using any of the format commands available on your tool bar. While this offers great flexibility, it can cause an endless amount of headaches later on. Suppose you decide to highlight certain key points in yellow. Later, after you page has grown to several hundred pages, you manager decides that the highlight color should be in blue. You now find yourself in the position of needing to change all of the highlighted text one at a time.

As an alternative approach, a cascading style sheet lets you specify formatting properties in a separate file that tells your web page how to format all of your font styles. In this scenario, you would only need to change the highlight style in the cascading style sheet to have ALL of the instances in your website updated in a single step. Do you want to change the entire appearance of your site by changing all of the background colors, heading and body styles? Just change their definitions in the style sheet and presto, all done.

Cascading style sheets are one of the most important tools in your web design arsenal.

Style sheets are easy to create and they offer an enormous amount of power. You have complete control over the presentation of your site and are not tied to page level formatting.

Here are some of the many things you can control using your style sheet:

• background colors for your page
• heading styles
• body styles
• unique formatting such as highlights or emphasis
• change the behavior and appearance of hyperlinks

This list represents only the most basic advantages of style sheets. At their most complex, cascading style sheets offer an amazing tool kit for organizing the entire layout of your site. With the current trends towards XHTML pages, cascading style sheets are becoming even more integral to the sites layout.