In many cases you'll find you end up with multiple CSS files due to scripts you may use from other sources which include their own CSS files, and programs outside of CC such as Visual Light Box or similar create their own CSS files also.

The least amount of CSS files you can manage the better for efficiency as it's less http requests to your server with less CSS files. But sometimes it cannot be helped. Many times I will combine multiple ones if they are not so huge (some of the external ones you get from outside sources are quite large) and end up confusing as JR has already stated, easier to find things in them. But many times it's not so huge that you can't combine them.

The main key to combining them though is to make sure you aren't overlapping code. Many times a specific script will call a specific CSS file and as long as you keep it separated there is no overlap, but when you combine them you usually have to adjust the path to the CSS file and of course make sure that no tags are duplicated with different attribute values. If you do find some that overlap, you can always rename them and change the class/id/etc. in the HTML file to reflect that change.

Hope that helps

Thanks Jo Ann & JR, that's really helpful advice & gives me a good starting point.

Not a lot to see different on the site apart from a temporary background on the font page - doing the full time work/single parenting thing takes it's toll on available time.

Been doing some w3schools studies - created an external css file, added the css link in the header area & moved the background thing to the body (as you suggested Jo) & added some comments. It's tidy, it works & I can understand it.

Not earth-shattering but pretty exciting for a web-minow like myself. Thanks again guys!

Awesome Robbie, so glad it all worked out. Enjoy studying up on CSS, it's actually a pretty cool thing to learn and the learning is actually pretty fun too. There's lots of sites out there with CSS tutorials just give a Google search for CSS Tutorials Free and you'll find lots of them. Same for HTML and CSS3 & HTML5 too.

I felt something.

Welcome to CoffeeCup Robbie.

Cheers Eric

Originally purchased some time back in 2005/2006 but didn't get very far between work & raising a family & more recently dealing with separation.
It's a great lot of software & looking forward to doing a lot more now - starting with the basics - also have the pro shop & designer so looking forward to that.

Just post for help if you get stuck. The shop in my sig has a few ideas if you need any.

Thanks Eric, appreciate it - great sites too. Will check out in depth a little later.

Not a whole lot of progress & still only the home & font (rubber stamps>fonts) pages still available.

The grungy looking backgrounds are growing on me & provide a nice contrast to the content... which is still coming.

Am quite happy (very nearly) with the header area now & have used the relative positioning thing to place the header/menu/page titles.

From what I gather, if I use an absolute reference for placing, I would need to fix the dimensions of the background. Currently it's pretty much free to be as large as the monitor or window (I have a nice pair of Dell27" monitors). The only downside to the relative positioning is that it does leave something of a gap to the rest of the content.

It's not the end of the world & I can live with the gap if needs be. Is it conceivably possible that I could create a container of sorts covering the rest of the content of each page & relatively position it up to close the gap a bit or is there something else I could do to bypass that all together & achieve the same effect without creating a gap in the process?

For reference this is the bit of css I added
.menu_drop {position:relative; left:400px; top: -177px;}
.menu_header {position:relative;top:-20px;left:-18px;}
.menu_title {position:relative;left:25px;top:-41px}

Thanks guys.


On a side note I did see this in the coding - 2 col HTML5 theme
<div id="wrapper">
I don't see anywhere a declaration of any kind. I'm guessing (possibly incorrectly) it's simply not doing anything & I can get rid of it & the corresponding </div> thing.

Bed time.

Technically I guess that is a working solution though it did leave a gap then below the "Content Goes Here" section. I haven't uploaded it so don't go looking for it.

Unless that fix fills anyone here with unspeakable terror (or you just plain have a better solution) I might run with that.