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Hiring a Web Designer: To Div & Sty with CSS

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Everyone in LA needs a website right? Just another tool of many to self promote your whatevers. Since we work on the web, all our friends ask if their web designer is the one for them? So instead of giving each of them a personal coaching session, we'll just post it here for your fun and their reference.

CSS is not CCR
Though more people are interested in Creedence Clearwater Revisited, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are here to stay. After all, LAist is built with lots of CSS in its code.

30 Second CSS 101
You have your words and you have how those words look. CSS styles a webpage. It gives typography, color, layout and much more. That's not to say regular ole HTML is useless and can't do the job, but CSS can have unyielding power and flexibility over a whole website with only minimal changes to its code.

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It's Fiscally Conservative
Really. In the big picture, it's going to save you money down the road. Everyone wants their webpage to change over time. Say, you want the wallpaper (the background color or image) to change throughout the whole website and, uh, the site is a hundred pages deep. That's a drag if you have to change every. single. page.

Oh? You used a Cascading Style Sheet when you built your webpage? Sure, that will take about 2 seconds total. At $75 a hour, how much is 2 seconds?

MACist? PCist? Doesn't Matter-ist.
Who doesn't love to disagree more than Microsoft and Apple? Internet Explorer blows. Use Firefox, even if you are on a Mac. Apple's Safari is cool, but is not as hot. The problem with the web is that webpages can look different in every web browser and computer platform. CSS and its future as a standard will fix that. Let's hope that Bill Gates doesn't keep on fighting it.

Could Save Snafu
You don't have to require your web designer to use CSS or have the whole website coded in it. But we thinks it's a good idea and should at least be used on the most consistent elements of a website (like navigation links that you see on every page). That's up to you, but in the end, CSS can save you the headache and lots of time and money.

And nerds all know... The code is more beautiful.

Photo by Russ Weakley via Flickr. Hmmmm... he must be a web designer.

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