resources for learning css

[kidmercury]

i'm well-versed in html, but i've never used css before. i'm starting to realize it's pretty important/handy for seo reasons. anyone know of any good resources for learning css, especially as an seo tool?

[Nick W]

>>seo tool

Nope, but you dont need that. Once learned, you'll KNOW what to do:

http://www.westciv.com - nice 'courses'
http://w3c.org/Style/CSS/
http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp


and if you go over to wmw and look in the css forums library, if they havnt removed it, i did a 4 part tutorial that'll get you started...

Nick

[kenpomachine]

And you have programs like Topstyle (http://www.bradsoft.com/topstyle/index.asp) that makes the editing of css very easy and intuitive if you know a bit of html.
You choose the selectors (.a, .body...) and then go to the options to chose the specific characteristics for it (font, margin, text decoration...) and it gives you the css code ready to save or paste :)

[Nick W]

Booo! Hisssss! Unclean unclean... :eek:

Real geeks code by hand ;)

Nick

[polarmate]

LOL, Nick!

Other tutorials:
http://www.htmldog.com/

Great articles:
http://www.alistapart.com/
http://www.meyerweb.com/

Examples to study:
http://www.csszengarden.com/

[kenpomachine]

:)

It's nice if everytime you were doing it by hand the css validator told you deprecated atribute and you didn't know what was wrong :rolleyes:

And yes, I'm lazy and don't code by hand, maybe by mouse... so what?

I'm not a real geek! :eek: :( snif

[werty]

This is a pretty sweet list of CSS guides and such:
http://www.dezwozhere.com/links.html

Also SuzyUK over at WMW went crazy in the forums and made an excellent series of posts talking about CSS(starting at post 23):
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum83/4514.htm

[mcanerin]

polarmate mentioned the http://www.csszengarden.com/ and I'd like to say that it was directly responsible for me redoing my site in CSS.

I started off handcoding HTML using vi through a telnet session on a Solaris server. If you didn't understand any of that - it's because you are very lucky that they invented that mouse thing and invented WYSIWYG tools before you started doing websites...

Because of this, I got kinda stuck in the HTML 3 stage, then went to WYSIWYG and stopped caring about code for a while. In fact, for a time I bypassed HTML altogether and developed totally in Flash, which indirectly is how I became an SEO ("Whaddaya mean Google can't see my site!?") So I always stuck CSS (and XHTML, etc) in the "thats for developers" folder of my brain and worked on other things.

Naturally, it didn't take long for me to realize the SEO benifits of CSS, so I took another look ("No tables!? Whaddaya mean no tables!?") I was pretty sceptical and was taking most of the negative press about CSS to heart (being an old fogey, the arguments of other old fogies resonate better with me) until I saw the zen garden....

3 weeks later my site was redone to HTML4 Strict + CSS (fully validated) and I finally started catching up with the rest of the world. :D

I've been considering learning XHTML but I understand that's only used for porn sites (or was that XXXHTML? I'm not sure.....) :p ;)

Ian

[Lex]

Here's another list of CSS articles (http://wdvl.com/Authoring/Style/Sheets/).

CSS Zen Garden (http://www.csszengarden.com/) definitely takes the top prize for inspiration.

[Chris_D]

Dave Shea's CSS Zen Garden is an excellent resource. Dave was over here in Australia for the 1st Web Standards conference 2 weeks ago - along with Doug Bowman and Joe Clark.

My only criticism of Zen Garden (which I discussed with Dave Shea) is that by putting EVERY graphic element into the CSS (as a background), you teach a new breed of designers some pretty bad accessibility habits. HTML is for content - and content can include images (with alt tags etc.)

I understand that Zen Garden is trying to show how cool CSS based designs are - but not every designer looking at Zen Garden understands that......

Separate content and presentation - but graphic images are sometimes background; and they are sometimes content.....