Welcome to CSS 101: a beginner's guide to beautiful websites!

About

CSS, short for cascading stylesheets, is a layer on top of HTML. In short, CSS is how we make websites look beautiful by adding borders, colors, specialized positions, specific spacing, and overwriting the default behavior that browsers apply to our HTML.

CSS 101 assumes you don't know any CSS whatsoever. We'll start at the very beginning with "What is CSS?" and how CSS is written.

CSS looks different from HTML, and the way we write it, known as "syntax", is important to know about. Plus, there are 3 different areas we can write CSS — when and where do we write our code in each place?

In this course, we'll cover all the beginner subjects, plus we'll dive into CSS properties such as font colors and sizes, background colors and images, height and width, padding and margin, borders and rounding borders, display properties, floating elements and much more.

You only need to know a little HTML to get started with this course. However, if you've never written any HTML then you'll want to learn basic HTML first.

Requirements

Basic knowledge of HTML
A text editor such as VS Code (download here)

Why you should learn CSS

CSS is the one and only way to make your website look beautiful. That's not an opinion, that's a fact. Frontend web technology for your browser is limited to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. By learning CSS you'll be familiar with 2 out of 3 frontend technologies.

But it's more than that — without CSS your website will look like it's from 1997. That was OK until about 2005. But these days you want a modern-looking website. A modern looking website will represent you better than a pure HTML website.

If you want to get into web development as a career, you will need to know CSS. That's non-negotiable. But don't think of it as a chore, CSS can be a lot of fun to code!

Beyond all of that, CSS is fun. It's a lot of fun, and incredibly rewarding, to take an ugly website and make it look beautiful. Every couple of minutes you can physically see the difference and improvements. Making your websites look and feel great is super rewarding, and they are fun to show off to your friends and colleagues.

Your project

There are several small tasks at the end of several videos for hands-on experience so you can practice what you've been watching right away.

At the end of this course, you'll take the navigation and hero from rocketman.learnwagtail.com and code it from scratch, just like you would in the real world — as if you were working directly with a designer.

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Corbin Chandler

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