CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. It is a web technology that has been around for a long time and only recently is becoming a popular tool for design. CSS web pages are faster to download, more uniform, and much much easier to change around down the road.

Most web sites have a "skin" or the design template that helps every page on the site look uniform and consistent. There are multiple ways to manage that skin. Some web masters choose the tedious, laborious method of formatting every single page individually. If they ever decide to change the site's look they have to go into every single page and alter all the formatting they want different. Some designers will use "include files" to keep structure uniform. Some will use a database and call the content into a template when a link is clicked. This works well if you know how to program in php, asp, ruby, .net, etc. and know how to use a data base. Some designers will make use of CSS.

The way CSS works is there is a global file (or multiple of them) that holds all of the properties of the different elements in the site. In layman's terms, the colors, fonts, sizes, backgrounds, etc. all sit in one file. Then, each web page looks at that file when it downloads to see how it should color its title and content. It knows how big to make the font. It can resize a table or image. In short, the html to format the page is all in one place.

When an agent decides to change the look and feel of the whole site he/she simply changes the CSS file and it updates all the pages as they load. This may not seem like much for first timers. It will, though, when you do your first redesign. It becomes a lot of work. My opinion is that it is better to invest a little extra time up front to save a ton of time in the long run.

There are many books out there on CSS. They are a quick read and usually help out a ton.

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