Getting Started With CSS: 20 Awesome Introductory Tuts

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Before We Begin

Before you get started, go ahead and familiarize yourself with why you should be learning CSS, and where it can be applied to web design. The following two sites should help to get you started with understanding what CSS is for, and how it can help you.

1. 10 Reasons To Learn CSS Here is a list of the top ten reasons why you should learn CSS – from creating more elegant web pages to having more control over specific elements in your design.
2. Wikipedia – CSS A basic introduction to CSS from Wikipedia with its history, syntax, and how it can be applied in modern web design.

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The Tutorials

Ok, you now know a little bit about the basics of CSS and what it can do for you. Let’s go ahead and jump right into some very basic, beginner tutorials to get you started with CSS. Take your time with each tutorial and make sure you understand each concept. A great tip is to break each tutorial down – do not try and complete all of these in one day! Try doing one part a day while spending an hour practicing each concept. This method will really help you hold this wealth of information in your brain for long-term memory.

1. CSS Basics You’ve heard the buzz about the seperation of style from content, but you are stuck in the world of nested tables and deprecated markup. If so, you have come to the right place!
2. Learn HTML & CSS: A Beginner’s Guide So, you’re ready to take the plunge and begin to learn how to build your own web pages and sites? Fantastic! We’ve got quite a ride ahead, so I hope you’re feeling adventurous.
3. Starting With HTML & CSS This short tutorial is meant for people who want to start using CSS and have never written a CSS style sheet before. Another great resource for beginners.
4. CSS – Beginners A very well structured and organized tutorial set that covers everything from how to set up your computer to write CSS, to how to create your own web pages!
5. CSS For Beginners This is a downloadable tutorial from deviantART for beginning CSS with features such as: Adding boxes around text, how to add background images, how to add menus for your links, and much more!
6. The Basics This ‘Basics’ section will give you enough knowledge to re-vamp your existing web sites and make your future web sites leaner and meaner – and will save you hours of update and maintenance time.
7. CSS From The Ground Up If you are frightened by the prospects of using Cascading Style Sheets, there’s no need to be. It all comes down to taking small steps to begin with and that’s what I’m going to do in this series of tutorials. One step at a time!
8. Back To Basics: A Beginner’s Guide To Starting A CSS Document What we’ll go over today is a quick and easy way of defining styles for common html tags that should dramatically cut down on the amount of guess work a browser will have to do to interpret your website.
9. Style Master CSS Tutorial This tutorial teaches CSS using both hand-coding and Style Master for Windows. You can also follow it using instructions for Style Master for Mac OS X.
10. Site In An Hour This is a very unique tutorial that interactively walks you through the steps of designing your own website. Perfect for visual learners, this tutorial makes CSS easy to see.
11. An Introduction To CSS This first CSS article is designed to get your ‘feet on the ground’. You should know at least a little about HTML and web design before you begin.
12. CSS Tutorials From beginner, to intermediate, to advanced, this resource has loads of tutorials to help get you started with CSS from the ground up!
13. CSS Introductory Tutorial It is time to take your web designing skills to the next level with CSS. It is a way to control the look and feel of your HTML documents in an organized and efficient manner.
14. Introduction To CSS A short, concise beginners introduction to CSS. Easy to read, simple to understand, and quick to follow, Design Shack has provided us with a great beginner’s guide to CSS.
15. CSS Do’s And Dont’s Part 1: CSS Selecting Selecting an element is the basis of the css styling process. If you can’t target an element you can’t style it, right? This article could help you to fix some of the errors you might have been doing.
16. CSS Do’s And Dont’s Part 2: Markup A tutorial instructing how to properly markup your CSS documents into a good, solid, well structured piece of code. This is very helpful for beginners to understand how to code CSS the right way.
17. Creating A CSS Layout From Scratch This guide will attempt to take you step by step, through the process of creating a fully functioning CSS layout.
18. CSS Beginner In this tutorial you will learn how to apply basic CSS (cascading style sheets) to your HTML documents to style and change the colors, backgrounds, fonts, text-sizes and more.
19. Video: Introduction To CSS Design Part 1 A relatively short video walking you through the basics of web design with CSS.
20. Video: Introduction To CSS Design Part 2 A relatively short video walking you through the basics of web design with CSS.

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Now What?

So you’ve gotten a basic grasp of CSS and its properties – now what? Follow some of these links to find intermediate and advanced CSS resources from tutorials and guides, right down to which CSS editor is right for you.

1. CSS – Intermediate
2. CSS – Advanced
3. 53 CSS Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without
4. Advanced CSS Layout
5. CSS Editors Reviewed
6. Powerful CSS Techniques For Effective Coding
7. Moving Forward With CSS
8. 101 Best CSS Techniques Of All Time Part 1
9. 101 Best CSS Techniques Of All Time Part 2
10. Using CSS To Do Anything: 50 Creative Examples And Tutorials
11. Clean And Pure CSS Form Design
12. 10 Examples Of Beautiful CSS Typography And How They Did It
13. The CSS Cheat Sheet
14. Introduction To CSS3 Part 1: What Is It?
15. Introduction To CSS3 Part 2: Borders
16. Introduction To CSS3 Part 3: Text Effects
17. Introduction To CSS3 Part 4: User Interface
18. Introduction To CSS3 Part 5: Multiple Columns
19. Introduction To CSS3 Part 6: Backgrounds
20. 5 CSS Questions – And Answers

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Conclusion

Hopefully you are well on your way to learning CSS and how to design your own web pages. Just keep these few simple things in mind:

DO:

• Practice
• Stay organized
• Learn how to do it right the first time

DON’T:

• Do too much at once
• Rush yourself through the learning process
• Worry about failing at first

Good luck!

For more CSS tutorials check out the new tutorial site, The Tutorialist.