Learn CSS

     I know HTML... In fact, I first learned it a decade ago when I was a nerdy little book-wormy, band-geeky teen. However, nowadays HTML is pretty bare-bones while CSS is used to flesh out the aesthics of a web page.  If you don't know the difference, CSS stands for cascading style sheets, and instead of coding each page, you can use CSS to give a cohesive, over-arching look to your site. See how cool CSS is at CSS Zen Garden.
     My work learning CSS has basically been the way I learned to HTML code, and how I like to learn a lot of technology; I give a cursory glance at the instruction manual as it flies to the floor. I'm first a do-er and then a researcher. Doing things first gives me a better understanding of how the whole thing works so I can have a clue when I read the manual/watch the tutorial/browse the FAQs/troubleshoot.

     So in that vein, here's how I'm working on my CSS skills, and how you can, too:

• Tweak someone else's code. I suggest building a website on Weebly, because it gives you a generic HTML/CSS template, lets you edit it and has a preview window. So, you can pick apart the code, changing the CSS, previewing it and thereby learning what happens when you change this or that. Trial and error. In Weebly, you can do this under the Design tab. Pick a template and then hit "Edit HTML/CSS" to the bottom right.

• Look at your favorite websites' CSS coding to see how they did it. To view the CSS on any website, right-click (or control-click for us Mac users) and "View source" or "View page source." This brings you to the HTML. The CSS will be in between the head tags... Look for something that ends with .css and has quotes around it. Then, cut that section out and paste it to the end of the website link you were looking at.

• Now that you've seen CSS in action and understand, check out some tutorials. Here's some: 
• Webmonkey - Tutorial, sample codes, and crib sheet.
• CSS Zen Garden pathfinder

• Write some of your own CSS!

Thanks to Bridget for the Webmonkey link. I'll try to re-do this sort of format down the road when I attempt javascript.