10 CSS Tips For Web Developers

By learning CSS tricks and tips, a web developer can quickly shake up the website's design and layout. A developer working in this industry might feel that he is always doing the same coding and layout design. Newer trends keep on arriving and fading, yet to some extent majority of the websites look and feel the same way – such as having a grid of 12 columns, 3-columned boxed layouts, and such similar-looking shapes. They are quite dull from the user's perspective, plus the user experience is inferior in taste as well.

For fundamentally shaking the design, one can get inspired by areas or fields that are far beyond the realm of digital design. Can’t a developer use editorial designs for the websites he creates? However, old habits die hard, yet one can play a bit with CSS properties to achieve this and open an endless space of newer possibilities.

Since the inception of the internet and the World Wide Web, CSS and HTML are in a marital bond! While HTML is probably one of the most natural markup languages to learn, learning CSS is not that effortless. Structuring a webpage is not much of a task. However, achieving the needed layout and look and feel of a webpage requires painstaking training and thoughtful grasp of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). These are some of the CSS tips and practices that every web developer must know to effectively set the layout of the page. This article presents 10 of the most crucial CSS tips for web developers.

1 – Implement Style-Sheet Inheritance

By using the inherit CSS keyword, an element can be specified for taking the already computed value from its parent. Style-sheet inheritance can be applied to any of the CSS properties for bolstering the default behavior and superseding other rules. It is recommended to use a single CSS document for the whole project. It helps with easy editing and updating the style of your website, as only one document will ever have to be updated. However, if multiple style-sheets are to be used, make sure that they implement only intrinsic properties while inheriting common properties from top-level style-sheets.

2 – Style Top-Level Elements First

CSS styling is intricate, and the order in which elements should be styled is critical. The rule of thumb is always to style top-level elements first and then the inner elements. For instance, HTML and BODY tags should be styled before styling encapsulated DIV tags.

3 – Understand When To Use IDs And Classes

IDs and classes are the most misused styling elements in CSS. However, the difference between the two is simple: Use IDs when you do not want to repeat your style for more than one element and use classes when you want to style multiple elements.

4 – Understand the CSS Box Model

As per the CSS box model, all elements within a page exist as rectangular boxes. The main content lies in the center while it is surrounded by attributes such as margin, border, padding. The CSS box model says that every box has five main attributes that define its size, width, margin, border, padding, height. To properly position your elements, grab a thorough understanding of the CSS box model. CSS box model makes developers’ lives easier!

5 – Shift To Flex-Box Model

The CSS box model is sufficient to implement website positioning; however, CSS3 has introduced the flex-box model that is even simpler. Get the hands-on practice of the flex-box model. It is the future of CSS.

6 – Give Logical Names To Classes And IDs

Classes and IDs should be logically named in the CSS file and should correspond to the tags they will style. It is vital for code organization and debugging. Using the direct class names within an HTML document is always a good practice that proves its worth in the later stages of debugging. Giving logical names to Classes and IDs is the time worth investing.

7 – Center Elements Via Style-Sheets

Do not use center tags to center-align the elements. This approach has become obsolete. Instead, use style-sheets to center text and areas of the HTML document. It can be done via text-align property and the margin property. It could be one of most-simplest of the tasks in the web development process; however, it can become too puzzling as more elements and styles are added.

8 – Learn To Use Debugging Tools

Debugging CSS can cause immense problems that can really destroy the momentum of creativity. However, it is a mandatory step for building any complex web-based project. It can become very irritating while you are designing a page, and suddenly, you notice that something is not aligned correctly. Several browser-based debugging tools can highlight CSS of the page on the fly when you hover your mouse over a particular tag. Two recommended browser-based tools are Chrome's Inspect Element and Mozilla's FireBug.

9 – Switch To CSS3

CSS3 is the most recent edition of CSS. CSS3 has several improvements over its precursor CSS, such as enhanced responsiveness, better colors, lesser alignment troubles, better animations, and incremented compatibility. It has also significantly reduced its dependence on JavaScript that has made it improve loading time. Though not a standard yet, most of the new development projects are done in HTML5 and CSS3. Sooner or later, CSS3 would become the standard; therefore, it is crucial to have a solid foundation of the CSS3 concepts ahead of the time.

10 – Practice, Practice, Practice

There is a myriad of free online resources available where code samples can be downloaded. Whenever you come across some cool visual web elements with appealing look and feel, try to inspect its CSS via Firebug or Inspect Element. Remember, practice makes perfect, and this rule applies wholly to cascading style sheets as well.

Wrap Up

For sure, CSS is one of the earliest milestones that arrived on the way of web development since the inception of the World Wide Web. It has been in use as long as graphical web browsers exist. While earlier tables were extremely slow and tiresome that rendered pages dysfunctional, CSS brought increased efficiency and functionality. Another possibility CSS introduced was that it enabled designers to achieve a lot of styles that were earlier made through with images.

CSS has this fantastic ability to turn the most minimal of layouts into a myriad of interactivity. We believe that with the deployment of these CSS tips into the web development process, a product engineering company can reduce costs, one can achieve a higher level of interactivity, user-experience for breaking the shackles of boring, similar-looking websites. We wish our readers a better web-development solutions experience and look forward for suggestions and more clarity regarding these tips.