Why Should You Use External CSS on Your Web Site?

When you use external CSS (cascading style sheets) to control the basic cosmetics of your web site, you need only to edit these cosmetic properties in one place to update ALL of your sites pages. This can be done from your server *if* your hosting service allows you to edit your site from a control panel, or you can easily edit the style sheet using a text editor such as Windows Notepad on your system and upload it to your server.

Cosmetic properties are defined as characteristics that do not interfere with your visitors' navigational experience. Not all CSS properties are safely compatible with all browsers, so you must be careful what properties you use. You do not want to negatively effect your visitors' experience at your site. Obviously, if your visitor is using an older version of Netscape to surf your site, and you have colored scrolls bars which do not display in Netscape, that would be considered a safe, cosmetic property. This is because the visitor using this old browser does not know the scrollbars are displayed in a different color if they were viewing your site with MIE, for example. This does not effect their navigation through your site. If it did, we would not consider it a safe, cosmetic CSS property.

Example Scenario:
Let's imagine that you have a music-oriented web site that you designed using our BasicTemplate #118 (thumbnail shown to the left). You have 500 pages on your site and you want to change the background color to something a little softer. You also want to change the font to Times New Roman, and you want to change the body text color to a dark blue rather than black. How difficult would it be to make these changes to all 500 of your pages? It would take only *seconds*! If you used straight HTML on all of these pages rather than CSS like the majority of web template designers do, I can honestly and sympathetically tell you it would be a major task to make these change on all 500 pages and could take hours - if not days.

That is the magic behind the concept of CSS. It is a web programming tool that is not difficult to use or understand. It is also a critical element if you make cosmetic updates to your site even once a year as most people do! This is especially true if your site consists of many, many pages.

Let's take a closer look at the changes we made:



It is certainly a subtle change in appearance; however, it could have been a design time intensive change if CSS utilizing an external stylesheet had not been used in the original template.

How long did it take us to make these changes on all 500 pages? 10 seconds :)

So we ask you, why would you want to design your web site without external CSS now that you know how to effectively utilize this amazing web programming script that is easy to learn and saves you tons of time?

If you want to save money too, we invite you to explore over 600 web templates strategically designed using external style sheets with interchangeable elements at www.basictemplates.com. You can buy only what you need or get access to all 600+ web templates via a membership plan.