Using CSS has many, many advantages. The biggest, in my view, is the ability to make site-wide changes by changing one small piece of code.

But another nifty feature of CSS is the ability to combine styles to achieve specific looks. For example, in the previous page about CSS I introduced the “Handy Classes” we have at our disposal.

A class not in that list is “bigIntro” which causes the paragraph containing the declaration to be really big with dark gray text.

The "Big Intro" style. Click for a larger image.

Say you like the “bigIntro” class and want to apply it to your opening sentence on your site, but you really don’t like dark gray as the text color. Using CSS you can combine as many style declarations as you like to achieve a specific look.

The <p> tag would look like this:

<p class=”bigIntro darkGreenText”>

Note the space between the two style declarations which is critical. You are free to substitute any of the colors listed in the “Handy Classes.” In this way you can modify the way your page looks, but keep it within the overall “look” of the SOU site.