When it comes to CSS, I’m a hack. I know what little I know from peeking under the hood, cutting and pasting, or repurposing free templates (like the great examples available at francey.org). But after three or four completely different blog designs (and at least half a dozen site redesigns before I started blogging), I’ve finally decided to learn CSS. I’ve tried a couple of books that didn’t work for me (the best was The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks, by Rachel Andrew), but now I be Stylin’ with CSS: A Designer’s Guide by Charles Wyke-Smith.
This thoroughly illustrated, highly readable book offers the clearest introduction to CSS that I’ve found. There’s no fluff in this slender guide. The first 65 pages are devoted to giving you an overview of XHTML and CSS. You’ll learn all about writing CSS rules, the document hierarchy, pseudo-classes, pseudo-elements, inheritance, the cascade, and rule declarations. Then it’s off to the races—how to style fonts and text, positioning elements, page layout, and creating interface components (like lists, menus, and forms). The final chapter puts it all together as you follow along and create the pages for a Web site for The Marvelous Land of Snergs, a children’s fantasy book written by Wyke-Smith’s grandfather, E. A. Wyke-Smith.
Stylin’ with CSS: A Designer’s Guide is written in a light, clear style. It doesn’t bog you down in esoteric details or debates. And it provides numerous, simple workarounds for dealing with IDWIMIE (It Doesn’t Work In Microsoft Internet Explorer), the bane of every Web designer.
Stylin’ with CSS is light on graphic design (I’ll probably look to The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web by Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag as a design companion), but I haven’t come across a better, simpler explanation of the coding that makes great design work.
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learning CSS is a great decision. Although I personally did not use any books (http://www.w3schools.com has a great reference), I found it insanely helpful with regard to the speed with which I code/manage designs. I personally jumped head-first into CSS, I took the default wordpress template, and forced myself to only change the stylesheet, and that’s pretty much how it went.
Oh, and best of luck with learning. I hope to visit the site a month later and see a fabulous original design. ;-)
I got far enough without reading up on CSS to modify your template, but I wanted to understand a little better what I was doing and I can only read so much onscreen. But deconstructing templates is a great way to understand what’s going on, and to get design ideas.
And yes, come back in a month (well, maybe two) and I hope to have to new original design, though I’ll always drop in on francey.org for inspiration!