What’s CSS and Why It’s Important

The way that your website looks, feels and reacts to a user’s actions are all thanks to a nifty tool known as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS, just like HTML, is a coding language that’s fundamental to web design.

CSS allows you to have the website that you have dreamed about. While you can get some great looking websites from all-in-one platforms like Wix or Square Space, you’re bound to only what they can offer you.

So, if you want a larger image or a different layout than what’s available, you’re kind of stuck. But, if you’re looking to outsource your website to an agency, you want to make sure that they have a developer with great CSS experience.

It Lets You Get Creative With Your Site

CSS allows developers and designers to define many different aspects of your site design including:

• Typography
• Spacing and padding
• Layout
• Background colors and images
• Hover effects on button and links
• Animations

This gives you complete control over what the site looks like and how the user interacts with everything.

It Enhances Responsive Websites

You’ve probably heard the term “responsive” about your website. A “responsive” website adapts to the size of your device so that users can view its content on any device with a web browser. You may have wondered how that was possible. Well, CSS is the main agent that enables responsive websites.

Special coding is used to shift the location of everything so that they condense properly. You want to make sure that your site doesn’t lose its functionality when changing from one platform to the next.

It has a large toolbox of techniques to enable responsiveness

The backend of a site can also be modified with CSS. Your coding skills allow you to:

• Declare rules that allow images to scale according to the width of the device.
• Improves user experience without changing the HTML by stacking images and content vertically when going from desktop to mobile.
• Can alter the typography for optimal readability. So, font sizes can be altered when needed.
• Can detect if browsers support particular features with support queries. For example, CSS Grid is a relatively new addition to the CSS specification and enables advanced layout features but not all browsers support it. We can define rules to use CSS Grid with fallback rules in case the browser does not support CSS Grid.

Again, complete control over everything so the user has no problems navigating your site.

Can Be Diversified for Different Web Browsers

CSS was released in 1996 and has had many updates since. From here, it is up to the browser vendors (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, etc) to implement each feature. Because of this, not all browsers support all CSS features or implement CSS features the same.

But, CSS can help make sure that your site looks and works the same no matter what browser is used. Generally speaking, Chrome and Firefox are quick to implement new features while Safari and Edge/Internet Explorer have traditionally been laggards.

Want to learn more about CSS?

We’ve used CSS on many different client websites and have seen the type of results you can get first-hand. We’d love to hear from you, so drop us a line!