CSS and Web Standards: How They Affect Your Small Business?

Elaine has made the big decision. She’s opting out of the rat race, will quit her job in two weeks and is busy preparing for facing the world on her own. She’s always loved making fancy period clothes and knows she can be very good at it. She also knows that her only chance of being successful is if she announces herself to the world online. She doesn’t want to spend extra for the services of web designer and figures she has enough computer savvy to design her own web page. Then she runs across CSS and starts scratching her head.

Help, anyone! I’m trying to create my own web page and I’ve been told that using a content management system or a blog template is much easier than trying to create something entirely from scratch. Well, easier said than done. I’m the inquisitive type and I have if something catches my attention I have this burning need to know. These Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, certainly caught my attention. Other than having a name that could very well be the title of a fashion collection, I think they’re closely related to a concept that I’m very familiar with – patterns! Am I correct?

– Elaine

You’re mostly right on the money, Elaine. Good thinking!

Here’s how the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, defines Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS are the mechanism through which changes in appearance and position can be assigned to HTML or XML elements, simply by declaring that they are of a specific style. The overall appearance of entire sites can be defined with CSS. To remodel the appearance only the CSS (not the individual elements) need to be changed. Less work, faster turnarounds, cheaper cost, and more reliable results.

In plain English, yes, CSS are patterns. If you need to make changes that will apply to many elements of your web page that are of the same kind, you only need to change the style sheet of that type and the changes will cascade to all the elements that have been tagged as belonging to that style.

Neat, yes?

By Astrid Eira

Astrid Eira is a resident B2B expert of FinancesOnline, focusing on the SaaS niche. She specializes in accounting and human resource management software, writing honest and straightforward reviews of some of the most popular systems around. Being a small business owner herself, Astrid uses her expertise to help educate business owners and entrepreneurs on how new technology can help them run their operations. She's an avid fan of the outdoors, where you'll find her when she's not crunching numbers or testing out new software.