CSS Tutorial
Introduction
CSS Properties
CSS Designing
CSS Advance Topics
CSS FAQs
Information & History
Welcome to the beginning of your CSS learning journey!
This tutorial is designed to help students and beginners understand the core concepts of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and how it works with HTML to style web pages. You’ll be able to use the code examples here as a reference for your own projects.
Let’s dive in!
What is CSS?
CSS is an abbreviation for Cascading Style Sheets. It is a style sheet language to manage the appearance and position of HTML elements on an HTML page.
- HTML gives the page structure.
- CSS gives style—in terms of color, fonts, space, and where they are.
If you don’t know HTML yet, it is advisable to read through the HTML tutorial first because CSS is based upon that.
Why "Cascading"?
The term “cascading” refers to how CSS determines conflicting style rules. If a number of styles are used on a single element, the browser runs a series of rules to figure out which style is used.
It’s referred to as the Cascade Algorithm, and it’s based on:
- Rule specificity (more specific selectors win),
- The style order (later styles override earlier ones),
- And inheritance (styles from parent elements).
Why Use CSS?
CSS is essential because it:
- Makes your website appear nice and professional to the eye.
- Enables custom layout, animation, and interactivity.
- Supports responsive design, so your website appears amazing on any device (phone, tablet, computer).
- Separates style and content, meaning your code is cleaner and simpler to maintain.
Visual Example: With and Without CSS
Check out a plain HTML page—just white text on black.
Now check out that same page with fonts, color, buttons, padding, and animation.
Before CSS
Plain text, no layout, no color
After CSS
Styled layout with color, spacing, and user-friendly design
CSS turns your page from boring to beautiful.
Analogy to Get a Feel for CSS
Think of a web page as a book:
- HTML is the text—the structure.
- CSS is the design—fonts, colors, headings, margins—everything that makes the book readable and enjoyable to read.
Without CSS, your site is raw content. With CSS, it’s a polished and enjoyable experience.
How Does CSS Work?
CSS applies rules of style to particular HTML elements.
The syntax of a simple CSS rule is like this:
selector {
property: value;
}
selector: The HTML element to style (such ash1,p, or.my-class)property: What you’d like to alter (such ascolor,font-size,margin)value: The value of that property (such asred,16px,10px)
Example:
p {
color: blue;
}
This CSS code targets all <p> (paragraph) elements and makes their text blue color.
Quick Activity
Try this on any site (even this one!):
- Right-click and choose Inspect or use Ctrl + Shift + C.
- Click the arrow icon (top-left of inspector panel).
- Hover over page elements to view the CSS applied.
It’s a cool method to observe how CSS is styling the webpage in real time!
Key Features of CSS
- Styles and positions elements on your page.
- Supports HTML and XML files.
- Makes mobile-friendly (responsive) designs possible.
- Supports interactive effects such as hover and animations.
- CSS is modular now, and fixes are pushed out regularly instead of version numbers.
- Let’s you reuse style on numerous pages.
Brief History
CSS was created by Håkon Wium Lie in 1996. During that time, websites were primarily text-based with little visual appeal. With the advancement of the web, there was a growing need for improved-looking visuals—and CSS became the norm for presenting web content.
More Resources
Conclusion
CSS is web design’s language. Now that you know how to utilize it, you can create cool-looking and user-friendly sites.
We are now going to talk about how to include CSS into an HTML document. Let’s proceed!