Welcome to the world of web design

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a powerful tool that transforms ordinary web pages into visually stunning and user-friendly experiences. Acting as the "magic wand" of web design, CSS defines how content created with HTML appears on the screen, adding style, color, and aesthetics to make your designs truly stand out.

Note

If you're new to web development and haven't explored HTML yet, we recommend starting with our Ultimate HTML Course. HTML serves as the foundation upon which CSS builds, and having a solid grasp of HTML will enhance your CSS journey.

What is CSS?

CSS, short for Cascading Style Sheets, is a styling language used to define document presentation in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). But what does that mean?

Think of HTML as the foundation of a house – it provides the essential structure and layout for your web page. Now, imagine CSS as the interior designer of that house. It's responsible for adding styles, colors, and aesthetics to the structure, making it inviting and visually captivating.

Take a look at this illustration:

On the left, you see plain HTML providing the basic structure. On the right, the same HTML comes to life with CSS, showcasing its styling magic.

Understanding CSS Syntax

CSS might initially seem like a foreign language, but it follows a simple syntax. A CSS rule consists of two parts: a selector and a declaration block. The selector tells us which HTML element(s) the rule applies to, while the declaration block contains one or more property-value pairs that define the styling.

Let's break it down with an example:

• The p is the selector, indicating that this rule applies to all <p> elements;
• color: purple; specifies that the text color should be purple;
• background-color: green; specifies that the background color should be green.

We'll delve deeper into selectors, properties, and values in later chapters, but for now, remember that CSS allows us to select elements and apply styles inside the curly braces {}.

What's Next?

In the chapters ahead, we'll dive deeper into CSS selectors, properties, values, and techniques to make your web pages visually appealing. By the end of this course, you'll have the skills to transform plain HTML into designs that captivate and inspire.