Part II- "Dress Up Your Website With Fantastic CSS Tricks"

In Part 1 of this series, we discussed the different ways of implementing style sheets into your site and the basic layout of tags. Now, let's move on to some of the fun ways you can dress up your site with some standard CSS tags.

Have you ever been to a website and saw text that appeared to have been highlighted with a yellow highlighter pen? Many sales-oriented sites use this technique to call attention to ad copy they want to stand out.

The tag looks like this:

<span style= "background-color:yellow"> Text Here </span>

Pretty simple, really. How about sites that remove the underlining from hyperlinks? Think it can't be done? Think again. Here's how to do it:

<style type="text/css">
<!--
A:link {text-decoration:none}
A:visited {text-decoration:none}
-->
</style>

or like this -

A:link, A:visited, A:active { text-decoration: none }

How about setting your link colors? And how about making the links change colors when you hover over them? This is easy, too, but be aware it only works in Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher.

<style type="text/css">
<!--
A:link { color: #0000FF }
A:visited { color: #000000}
A:hover { color: #FFCC33 }
-->
</style>

Many sites you go to these days have fancy colored scroll bars instead of boring gray ones. This code only works in Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher; Netscape users will still see the standard gray.

<STYLE TYPE="text/css">
<!--
body {scrollbar-3dlight-color:#ff9909;
scrollbar-arrow-color:#000099;
scrollbar-base-color:#ff9909;
scrollbar-darkshadow-color:#000099;
scrollbar-face-color:#ff9909;
scrollbar-highlight-color:#000099;
scrollbar-shadow-color:#ff9909}
-->
</STYLE>

If you'd like some free software that will generate the colored scroll bar tags easily, go to
http://www.harmonyhollow.net/cool_web_scrollbars.shtml  You'll also find an online tool you can use to generate the code at: http://www.draac.com/mouseover-scrollbars.html

Page Margins are easy to control with CSS and can be set in mm,cm,in,points (pt) or pixels (px).

Example: To set a left margin
margin-left: 2.0 in;

To set all 4 margins at once use
Body {margin: 2 in }

To set individual margins at once use
Body {margin: 2% 5% 10% 12% }

Did you know some sites even use CSS to lay out their tables? This is a pretty advanced topic and not for the faint of heart:

http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/02/28/table-based-layout-is-the-next-big-thing/

Want to keep a background image from tiling on your pages?

Body {background: #333399 url (filename.gif) no-repeat center}

Think indenting paragraphs online is impossible?

P { text-indent: .50in }

Tables don't have to be boring. You can give em fancy borders by inserting this instruction into your table tag:

Style= "border: 4px solid red"

You can change the above color and px size to whatever you'd like.

Ever notice how almost all submit buttons are all dull gray? Yours doesn't have to be. Use the following tag between the <form> tags.

<form>
<input type= "submit" value="submit" style="background-color:
#333399>
</form>

For more information on dressing up your forms with CSS see these tutorials:

http://outfront.net/tutorials_02/adv_tech/funkyforms1.htm

These are just a few of the page elements you can control with CSS. For more tricks and tips, visit some of these sites:

http://www.boogiejack.com/intro_to_CSS.html
http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/
http://www.mako4css.com/Tutorial.htm

Using CSS to dress up your site is really pretty simple. Just a few tags can have you looking like an instant Webmaster Genius. Try some today and your friends will be dying to know your secrets. Whether you share or not is up to you.