With cascading stylesheets, you’ll be able to control almost any display item on your website including setting margins, indents, font types, sizes and styles, borders, backgrounds and colours.

What are stylesheets?

A stylesheet or cascading stylesheet (CSS) is the term used to describe a file or section of code on a webpage that adds specific styles such as fonts, colours and spacing to your webpage.

Ideally, you should have one external stylesheet file that can be referenced from each webpage. This means you benefit from consistent styling throughout your site.

Your stylesheet file will be a set of rules that control the displayable elements of your webpage. Each rule is made up of an HTML element name such as BODY, H1, P, and the desired style attribute to be used. The HTML element will have various attributes that can be modified.

Examples are as below:

H1 { font-size: x-large; color: #C1C1C1 }

There are plenty of excellent tutorial websites that explain stylesheets in great detail. Some examples are:

http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/learning

http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/Style

http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp

Another benefit in using stylesheets are that your webpage HTML markup will be smaller, making it quicker to load and also easier for the search engines to read the content and determine how to index the page.

If you don’t use stylesheets, you risk having different styling on each page. When ever a styling change is made, it also means you will spend longer updating the code.