Working With CSS On Your Own

Throughout the rest of the book you'll continue to work on creating and refining CSS styles to control appearance and layout. For additional practice, you can create your own external style sheets using the techniques learned in this lesson and link them to the pages that you've been creating in your own site through the work in the previous On Your Own sections. You can also experiment with several of the CSS documents that are provided within Dreamweaver as samples and starting pages by applying them either to pages within your own Website or to copies of the starting files in the Yoga Sangha project site. Exploring other style sheets is a good way to learn about what is possible with CSS and to discover techniques that you might be able to incorporate into your own pages.

1.	Choose File > New and choose the Page Designs (CSS) category in the General portion of the New Document dialog box. Select a style sheet such as Halo Left Nav from the Page Designs list. Click the Create button. Dreamweaver will create the new document and prompt you to select the location in which the file will be saved. Some starting pages might require files such as graphics that will automatically be copied to your site. During the process of copying the necessary files to your site, you might see preliminary content appear in the HTML documentit will refresh after the files have been copied. The Halo Left Nav style sheet will create a page that looks similar to the following example. You can preview it in the browser to see how it will look. Note Halo is one part of a set of componentsincluding HTML and Flash elements, layout options, and an interface design created by Macromedia and integrated throughout the Studio programsthat are geared toward helping Web developers create positive user experiences. Turning on the CSS Layout Background visual aid that you used in the previous exercise will let you see the wide array of styles that work together to create the layout.
2.	Use the techniques you practiced in this lesson to create styles for your own site.

As you create styles, remember to be aware of the differences between internal and external styles and what kinds you are creating. Think about creating styles that help to visual distinguish the hierarchy of the content.