The Creative Coder's Handbook

HTML & CSS for Modern Websites

About Author

Introduction

A Brief Introduction To CSS

How To Set Up Your CSS and HTML Practice Project With a Code Editor

How To Understand and Create CSS Rules

How To Declare Values For Multiple Properties In a CSS Rule

How To Style Images With CSS

How To Create Classes With CSS

How To Create IDs with CSS

How To Create Pseudo-classes With CSS

How To Style the HTML

How To Adjust the Content, Padding, Border, and Margins of an HTML Element With CSS

How To Set Up Your CSS and HTML Website Project

An Overview of Our Demonstration HTML and CSS Website

How To Style the Body of a Website With CSS

How To Build the Header Section of Your Website With CSS (Section 1)

How To Build the About Me Section of Your Website With CSS (Section 2)

How To Build a Tiled Layout With CSS (Section 3)

How To Add a Resume or Employment History Section To Your Website With CSS (Section 4)

How To Add Your Educational History and Skills To Your Website Using CSS (Section 5)

How To Create a Featured Quote Box On Your Website Using CSS (Section 6)

How To Create a Static Footer With HTML and CSS (Section 7)

About the Author

Yadav Randhir Prasad is a highly accomplished professional with over 17 years of experience in computer science, multimedia design, and content creation. He holds a strong academic foundation, including an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Multimedia Design (2007) and two Master's degrees – one in Computer Science and Multimedia Design, and another in 3D Animation Technology (2010).

Yadav's expertise spans across industry and academia. He has a proven track record of working with leading Indian brands like ZEE, APTECH Ltd., Xplora, Animaster College, and MAAC. Additionally, his skills have been valued internationally through teaching positions at universities in Mauritius, Uganda, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, and South Africa.

Beyond his academic and corporate experience, Yadav has established a successful freelance career, collaborating with numerous media agencies and consulting on diverse projects.

Yadav is a passionate educator and currently serves as a Computer Science Department instructor, specializing in web development and programming languages.

A prolific writer, Yadav's expertise extends to the publishing world. His work has been featured in various technical publications and regularly appears on influential technical blogs. Additionally, he is the author of several books on multimedia design, animation, web technologies, and game design. These books are widely used within the industry and educational institutions worldwide.

Introduction

About this Book

This project-based book will introduce you to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), a stylesheet language used to control the presentation of websites, by building a personal website using our demonstration site as a model. Though our demonstration site features Sammy the Shark, you can switch out Sammy's information with your own if you wish to personalize your site.

Alongside HTML and JavaScript, CSS is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web. If you have some understanding of HTML and are looking to grow your front-end development skills, learning CSS is a great next step.

The first half of this book will introduce CSS through hands-on exercises and the second half of the book will provide steps for recreating the demonstration website. If you want to start building the demonstration website right away, you can start with the chapter How To Set Up Your CSS and HTML Website Project and proceed from there.

By the end of this CSS book, you will have files ready for deploying a website to the cloud, as well as an understanding of how to continue modifying the site's design with HTML and CSS. You will also have a foundation for learning additional front-end web development skills (such as JavaScript) and frameworks (like Tailwind).

Prerequisites

A code editor like Visual Studio Code or Atom. This series will use Visual Studio Code as our default code editor but you may use any code editor you like. Certain instructions may need to be slightly modified if you use a different editor.

A web browser like Firefox or Chrome. This book will use Firefox as our default browser but you may use any browser you like. Certain instructions may need to be slightly modified if you use a different web browser.

Two different profile photos, images, or avatars for personalizing your site (optional).

Familiarity with HTML. If you aren't familiar with HTML or would like a refresher, you can follow the first ten tutorials of our series How To Build a Website With HTML before starting this series.

Once you have your prerequisites ready, you will be ready to start your CSS website project in the chapters ahead.

A Brief Introduction To CSS

Written by Erin Glass

This tutorial will briefly introduce the historical origins of CSS and give a high-level overview of how CSS works with HTML. This tutorial will prepare you to follow the hands-on exercises and website building project in the tutorials ahead.

History of CSS

CSS was first introduced by Håkon Wium Lie in 1994 while working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) alongside Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. At the time, webpages were typically created exclusively with HTML, the Hypertext Markup Language that Berners-Lee had developed in the 1990s. However, HTML had been developed to describe the semantics of a web document's components (such as its headings and paragraphs) rather than provide style instructions. As the growing use of HTML to style webpages became increasingly unwieldy, CSS was introduced to provide a more efficient method for styling the display and layout of a website in conjunction with HTML.

How CSS Works With HTML

Websites that are built with HTML and CSS will typically consist of an HTML file that contains content such as text, image links, and HTML tags, and a CSS file that contains style rules that are applied to the HTML

content. For example, an HTML file might have header text (marked up with the HTML tag

) and paragraph text (marked up with the HTML tag

). Its corresponding CSS file might have rules instructing