External CSS Cascading Style Sheets

"What is External CSS? Why should you use it in your web design projects?"

This is a common question that we are asked because we developed our website templates using "external" cascading style sheets. CSS is not new; it has been around longer than most people have had internet access. CSS has evolved tremendously over the past years and it is one of the biggest discussions among web designers today.

One important factor is knowing the different types of CSS and how or when to use each. The majority of websites online today should use "external" stylesheets rather than internal or inline. Many template designers state that they use CSS in their designs, but are they using it correctly? 95% of them are not. If you purchased a web template and it does not contain 99.999% external CSS, then you can be sure that you are dealing with a "graphic template designer" and NOT a "web template designer". This is especially true if the template you purchased allows for little room for actual "content" because it contains excessive, heavy graphics that have no real purpose. Or the navigational structure of the design is so extremely non-traditional, that it would take your sites' visitors far too long to find the information they came to your website to find.

Web templates are defined as exactly what it says: "WEB". I don't see the word "GRAPHICS" in the phrase "World Wide Web", do you? ;) If the concept of the Internet was to visit websites developed mainly with graphics, then I'd imagine the Internet developer gods would have called it the "World Wide Graphics" ... WWG (for short).

What we have found is most web template designers who state that they use CSS are not using EXTERNAL CSS at all, very little, inaccurately, or they are using a combination of external, internal, and inline CSS. The worst of the worst website template designers are using all three CSS types with redundant HTML tags which the CSS was suppose to replace. I'd give them an "E" for effort, but they seriously need to learn CSS before causing their (now ex-)customers anymore headaches.

On a regular basis our sales office receives inquiries from unhappy customers who bought a template elsewhere and plead with us to "FIX IT --- PLEEEASE!". We do our best when we can and try not to cause these poor folks who have already been scammed anymore grief by charging them an outrageous rework price. Most often their best option is to purchase one of our HTML-CSS Templates instead.

So back to our original questions: "What is External CSS and why should you use it?" The answers to these questions and why we at BasicTemplates.com utilize the external stylesheet concept in our designs can be found here.

// posted by BasicRic on 1/21/2005 10:14:42 AM / Permanent Link