GeekSpeak: Cascading Style Sheets
What’s in a name? Though you’ve most likely heard of Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, if you’re reading this, you may not have ever stopped to think about each of the terms that comprise the acronym. Style refers to all of the components of a document (Web page) related to its presentation or appearance–typography, colors, borders, margins and padding, and other layout-related items. And cascading refers to an crucial aspect of the Web language: the priority scheme, or hierarchy, that is integral to its functionality.
In the early days of the Web, content and presentation alike were dictated by HTML–an inefficient model that meant that every time we wanted to make a link purple, or make a font a certain size, we had to define it as such; one that begged for a more robust solution. But the concept of style sheets has actually been around since the 1980s. In the mid-’90s, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) chose two proposals as a foundation for the CSS that we know today, and published its CSS Level 1 Recommendation in late 1996.
Today, CSS has as dominant a role as ever on the Web alongside HTML. Its advantages are numerous: it reduces clutter by consolidating style- or appearance-related markup, it encourages consistency across different browsers, it helps optimize a Web document for crawling by search engines, and it enhances flexibility and accessibility when we are spending an increasing amount of time viewing the Web on our mobile devices.
Though CSS code looks markedly different from that of HTML or XHTML, and some of its facets remain somewhat daunting for first-time users (the float and overflow properties, for example, or child and descendant selectors), its syntax is actually relatively simple. CSS can also be incorporated in different ways: inline, meaning nested inside an HTML tag; embedded, meaning within the <head> of a document, or in an external document.
As competition in the Web browser industry becomes increasingly heated and Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, and others take divergent paths in their implementation of standards, consistency and compatibility across browsers remains the biggest challenge CSS faces today.
Living vicariously through your child…theme
WordPress is an awesome tool in that it allows people to take an existing theme, one that some generous developer has spent hours and hours creating, and customize it through simple to complex modifications to the CSS and PHP files that accompany it with the install. In essence, it provides the backend programming that gives our sites the powerful functionality that allows visitors to our site to actually interact with us. But, like everything else involved with WordPress, themes are updated from time to time and if you want to apply these often-times necessary updates to your site you will lose most, if not all, of the modifications you made to style your site and make it your own. This can be not only frustrating, but time consuming if you constantly have to re-style your site to represent your brand. Read More…
CSS – An Introduction
Cascading Style Sheet (or CSS) documents are a set of rules that contain the elements of style for a web site, such as background color, font size and type, boxes, and borders. HTML or XHTML documents contain the text and content, but link to CSS documents to control how the page looks. So, CSS has style, and HTML has substance. These style commands “cascade” down from the homepage on through the rest of the site architecture, affecting the entire site. This means that making a change on an external style sheet can update the appearance of the entire site!
Keeping Up With CSS
CSS has been a great change for website developers all over. It was like a giant crowd jumping up for joy when the existence of tables no longer made up the code for websites. Many websites today still use the clunky tables to form the website layouts but they are easily recognizable as outdated. Not to mention that they are slow in loading and not very good when it comes to SEO.
Not For Sale – Non-Profit
Name: Not For Sale Campaign
URL: http://www.notforsalecampaign.org/
Audience: Individuals concerned about the slavery issue around the world that have the drive to create innovative solutions but don’t necessarily have the tools to implement. They also aim to attract more donors to the cause.
Business/Site Goals: Not For Sale envisions a world without slavery and aims to enable and mobilize all individuals to take action in the fight against slavery in any scale, your country, your city, your household.
Technologies used: WordPress, HTML, Photoshop, CSS, PHP, Vimeo.
Not For Sale Campaign
KFRC Radio – Media
Name: KFRC Radio
Audience: Music fans that appreciate classic rock from the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, including: The Doors, Led Zepellin, Jimy Hendrix, Queen, etc. Most likely their audience is concentrated between 40 and 60 years old living in the San Francisco area.
Business/Site Goals: Keep classic hits alive leveraging on new technology.
Technologies Used: WordPress, CSS, Photoshop, Audio Streaming, PHP, HTML.
KFRC Radio Screenshot
Breaking Tweets – Entertainment
Name: Breaking Tweets Entertainment
URL: http://www.breakingtweets.com/entertainment/
Audience: Very active Tweeters looking for fresh news to keep informed and fuel their tweets with the latest.
Business/Site Goals: Provide users with a database/archive of key entertainment news events each day and consumer reactions and responses to these news.
Technologies Used: WordPress, HTML, Twitter, CSS, PHP, Google Ads.
Breaking Tweets Entertainment Screenshot
Managing Your Web Presence: Strategic Digital Platform Fundamentals 
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