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Category: CSS

Free website design!

23 December, 2007 (07:19) | CSS, Website design, Website layout | By: clive

You need a website but don’t have a budget to pay someone to design it for you. Did you know that there are literally thousands of professionally designed websites available for you to download for FREE? Yes, for free and you can even use them for commercial purposes. Usually all that you need to do in return for using the design is to include the authors details on your webpage. Oh, and you don’t need any programming knowledge at all. Just open the .html file in any text editor and substitute the sample text with your own.

These websites or CSS templates as they are known, consist of a cascading style sheet template and an html file. These templates are the code that creates the webpage, giving it it’s layout, choice of colour, fonts, graphics, etc and contain sample text. All that you have to do is to download the template, unzip it ? it will generally contain at least 2 files:

  • an index.html file which is in effect the home page, here you will substitute the sample text with your own;
  • the 2nd file will be called something like style.css ? it is the style sheet and contains the layout code for the index page. You do not need to change anything here.

So there it is, just download the template that you have chosen. Unzip it, open the .html file in a text editor such as notepad and substitute the sample text with your own and you have a professionally designed website, for free!

Here are a couple of links where you can get your free css template:

http://www.oswd.org/
http://www.solucija.com/home/css-templates/
http://www.freecsstemplates.org/
http://www.ex-designz.net/template/default.asp

Don’t forget that we can help you customise any webpage for you. We can even add a database to it. Use the contact form let us know what your needs are.

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Why You Should Use CSS

18 December, 2007 (15:24) | CSS, Website design, Website layout | By: clive


Why You Should Use CSS
By Allan Burns

It seems more and more webmasters are using CSS for the design and layout of their sites rather than depending on tables and HTML mark up. As well as being more efficient in terms of page size and reusing CSS templates many webmasters believe that it also contributes towards search engine friendliness.

Jacob over at Blogging Pro has written an article based on his personal experiences and points out what he believes to make a better more search engine friendly site.

For a long time I have always loved using tables for site layout, but the general consensus is now that tables are bad for layout. I agree once you start nesting tables things start to get complicated and messy. All of this extra HTML in your page gets in the way of the real content that the search engines are after. If you separate design from content the search engines can just crawl the content and ignore the design.

Separating content from design also means that pages are much easier to update, rather than having to rewrite every page all you need do is alter the stylesheet. This saves you no end of time and saves you no end of bandwidth, the browser only has to pull down the stylesheet once if you use it for all of your pages. Not only have you saved on bandwidth costs but you have speeded up page loading, this is good for both your visitors and the many bots that crawl your site.

I have started to use CSS in more of my sites and I am going to use CSS solely on my next site which means learning about how CSS is used for layout. One of the sites that I have found useful is the Web Design Group where they have a guide to cascading style sheets. The site also includes lots of links to other CSS resources.

If you are not using CSS it would be well worth your time learning the CSS tags and their properties. Think of it as a future investment, the time you spend now will pay for itself in better search engine ranking, saved bandwidth and you will cut down on your maintenance and development time for your new sites.

From the Blog of Allan Burns. Plenty of tips to keep you busy on yuor website.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Allan_Burns
http://EzineArticles.com/?Why-You-Should-Use-CSS&id=50508



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