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Web Page Design Module 7: Formatting Text with Cascading Style Sheet

Cascading Style Sheets
The content of most web pages is text-based, so one of your objectives as a web designer is to make the text readable and attractive. You can enter text in a Dreamweaver file just as you would in a word processor. If you have existing text you can copy and paste it or import it from a source file such as Word or Excel. Text formatting attributes such as paragraph formatting, heading styles, fonts, size, color, alignment, indents are easy to define using the HTML property inspector, the CSS property inspector, or the CSS Styles panel.

The HTML Property inspector is displayed by selecting the <HTML> button on the Property inspector. HTML code is built from a series of tags based on the selections made.
html property inspector

Cascading style sheets consist of sets of individual rules or sets of formatting attributes. You create style sheets when you want to apply the same formatting attributes to web page elements such as text, images, and tables. A style sheet can contain different rules that can be applied to paragraphs, headings, tables, etc. If you decide to edit an existing rule, the changes are applied to all element formatted with that rule. CSS style sheets can be stored either externally with a .css extension and attached to one or all pages of a website or they can be stored internally in the code for an individual web page. CSS rules can be created using the CSS Property inspector or the CSS Styles panel.

CSS Property Inspector
CSS property inspector

CSS Styled Panel
CSS styles panel

You will practice importing text and creating cascading style sheets as you work through the Background Building activities for Module 7.

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