So in a wierd turn of events, I got hired on to do mainly html/css work for this small company that my sis's bf is temping at.  Wierd because I know nothing of coding as some of you may know and that they basically were fine with it without ever meeting me solely on his recommendation.

He knew that I had no knowledge but was sure that he could teach me what they would ask of me easily.  So I basically got a crash course a couple weekends ago in html and css through the use of dreamweaver.  I have to say that html is surprisingly easy to follow given I had no knowledge of it really beforehand except for a few tags.  css on the otherhand, I'm having a little trouble with.  When he gave me an overview of it, it made complete sense but recently when I tried tom play around with it, I just simply couldn't get it to work.

Ive basically been solely using W3Schools as a learning point, but was curious as to whether or not any of you had other sites/tuts I should take a look at as a complete noob.  Im actually even interested in such things as possible small projects I could try and do to get a better understanding of things.  Seriously any little thing helps as my knowledge of this field is embarrasingly minimal.

Besides that, the only thing right now I couldn't figure out is how I'm suppose to implement css in dreamweaver.  I see the little box for it in the righthand corner but it makes no sense to me whatsoever.  Referencing W3Schools, I simply tried writing up some stuff in the header which seemed to work, but also not.  For example, the in-window preview works fine but if I tried it out on a browser its still unformatted.  Like if I put a property for like h1 or such, it works in dreamweaver preview, yet it does not register when I actually load it up in firefox.  Certain markups do work though which is the strange thing like for list styles, and for "a" color & text-decoration.

Haha congrats xD

CSS was definitely tough for me, and generally speaking Dreamweaver doesn't really preview CSS well. The website that some designer made for my office shows up like shit in Dreamweaver preview, but it's perfectly fine in browsers.

Kind of hard to tell what your problem might be though without seeing the code. Copy/paste some of it?

I suppose you could also forgo using Dreamweaver for the CSS and use something like EditCSS (I don't know if it's still worth using or not, I haven't used it in a couple years) to do your CSS. I don't use Dreamweaver so I can't be totally helpful with why it doesn't work there . . .

Also, Veerle created a nice list of starting places that you may find useful.

ive just been putting all the css code in the header of the html file but i guess thats not how it works? i looked at one of the links on veerle and it tells you to link to an external file in the header.  i guess ill try that next time im playing aroudn with that stuff to see how that works.

CSS can be put in the header, but that gets pretty lengthy with large sites with lots of different styles. Putting the styles in an external .css file allows you to include the css with a single line of code on the webpage.

I can't think of why your styles wouldn't be showing up in the browser or in Dreamweaver...Maybe creating an external css file will clear up any issues that are going on? Since it sounds like you already have a stylesheet going in your current HTML file, what you need to do to get it to an external file is this:

1. With the html page open in Dreamweaver, you'll see the CSS bar on the right-hand side of the screen. Right click on at the top of the CSS screen.

2. Click on Export. Save the file in your website's folder.

3. Now right click on the webpage.

4. Scroll to CSS styles, and click on Attach Stylesheet. Browse and select the stylesheet you just created. You want to "link" to the stylesheet.

5. Now, your original CSS coding is stil going to be in the header. To easily delete it (since it's no longer needed), right click on in the CSS menu and click delete.

If for some reason your CSS isn't being implemented in Dreamweaver, maybe this will help?

Quoting Anya:

Putting the styles in an external .css file allows you to include the css with a single line of code on the webpage.

Also to add to that, one of the nicest things about CSS is that if you set "global" styles for your headers to look a certain way, and all your webpages link to the external css file, if you ever want to change how your h1 looks (for example), you'd just need to change it once in the external css file and the change will port to the entire site. If you put styles in the headers though, you'd need to go through each of the pages one by one to change the h1 style... on big sites with hundreds of pages it'd be a pain. Not to say Dreamweaver doesn't have a good find and replace function, but... definitely much cleaner if you go through an external css file.

yea, i understand the css coding, i guess i just had trouble on how to implement it.  Im fucking bogged down with this film project for school which I've been losing not only time, but sleep and meals on....so yea i wont be trying any of this stuff for awhile.

Thanks alot for the responses thougy guys! really appreciate it.

Crap, you may also check out Pootato's tut on CSS. It may or may not help you sort things out.