The Wonders of Content Management Systems

As you get serious about your web site, your time will become invaluable. A content management system is the best way to maximize your efforts.

What A Content Management System Does for You

A good CMS system will allow you to update can entire site by making a change one time in the admin that can carry over to all pages of your site. This means you can change the menu, side bar, page bottom, site design, or other sections of your site all at one time. So while some webmasters are changing every page, others can have the task completed in minutes.

Includes, Style Sheets and Content Management Systems

For the do it yourself webmaster, or a professional web designer looking to easily improve update efficiency, there is a middle ground between plain HTML pages and full-blown CMS.

Includes

By simply using an include on your sites, you can allow your entire site to be updated with one change. Includes are files that are included in a web page with one line of code. This allows all pages with that file included to be updated by changing the include file one time.

Style Sheets

Style sheets operate in much the same way as includes. One line of code calls a file capable of determining the look of text and graphics on the site. Entire site designs can be created with style sheets. An example of the power of style sheets can be seen at http://www.csszengarden.com/. Using style sheets can allow webmasters to change the entire look and layout of the site by changing one file.

In Closing

Manually changing a web site is for the birds. Use a content management system and you’ll actually have time to have a life beyond your site.

How To Style Your Text With CSS

Styling text with CSS is really simple. We can define colors, underline it, make it bold, define the font etc etc.

We will start with some basics.

First we define the html where we will be working with.

This is the text

1. Colorize your text

We can select the P tag and add some styles to it.
p {
color:red;
}

Now our text will turn red. You can define any color code your want or choose one of the 16 standard color names. The color names are: aqua, black, blue, fuchsia, gray, green, lime, maroon, navy, olive, purple, red, silver, teal, white and yellow.

2. Define the size of your text
p {
font-size:12px;
}

You can define any font-size you want, 145 pixels is not a problem. That is, technically speaking.

3. Make the text bold or Italic
You can use the font-style property to create these effects.

Bold:
p {
font-weight:bold;
}

Italic
p {
font-style:italic;
}

4. Overline, Underline, strike-through and none

The text-decoration property is useful to create the underline and the other effects we need.
p {
text-decoration:underline;
text-decoration:line-through;
text-decoration:overline;
text-decoration:none;
}

On default, the text doesn’t have any lines at all. Except for the link. You can remove the underline by using the text-decoration:none; setting.

You see, it’s quite easy to style your text using CSS. And you can do it all in a separate stylesheet!