Web designers and programmers often have a bad tendency of throwing terms around that don’t mean much to anyone outside the “circle." I admit it – I’m guilty of this just as much as the next guy.

My passion is CSS. What is CSS? Glad you asked. CSS (cascading style sheets) is how we programmers make websites look the way they do. More on how that works in a bit.

There are two main components in a website – the logic and the look. The “logic” can be one or a combination of programmer languages such as HTML and PHP (just two examples). The “look” is generally done with CSS.

As I would guess most of you reading are not programmers, I’m going to explain this as conceptually as possible without showing any examples of code (our language). Here we go…

You have a website and all of the font is black. But one day you decide you don’t like black anymore and want to go with a dark gray. Instead of editing every page on your website to change the font color, we can change one part of one file – the CSS file. Every time a page on your website loads, it first loads the stylesheet. Your web browser looks at the stylesheet then interprets the rest of the code based on what the stylesheet says. In essence, your web browser is saying, “OK, I have this sentence from ‘the code.' The stylesheet is telling me that all text is gray, so I’m going to display it gray.”  

At this point you may be saying, "So that’s it? All CSS can do is change your text color for the entire website? Lars, that doesn’t sound like something worthy of being your passion."

Thankfully CSS can do SO much more. Not only can we set these "rules" for something across the entire website, we can also designate attributes for certain sections of a website – such as your sidebar or footer. Also, there is so much more than font color that stylesheets can control. They run from simple things such as what font you’re using to more complex things such as the radius of the blurred shadow behind an image when you hover over it with your cursor.

Knowing the possibilities that CSS can achieve is an invaluable asset in the world of web design.

It is exhilarating to take a client's vision for the functionality of their website and make it a reality. CSS allows me to make those visions a reality and THAT is why CSS is my passion.