DotNetNuke® Websites: Problem — Design — Solution

Chapter 8. Customizing with CSS

Now that you've become more familiar with the DNN interface and adding content to the MBR Design website using a variety of modules, you're probably wondering, "How can I customize the look and feel of content, modules, skins, or even the overall DNN environment?" Cascading style sheets (CSS) is the answer.

CSS is used to format the layout of web pages and gives both website designers and developers a great deal of control over web page presentation. Designers and developers use CSS to define colors, fonts, layout, and other aspects of web pages. It is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content (HTML) from document presentation (CSS). This separation can improve content accessibility, provide more flexibility and control of presentation characteristics, and reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content. CSS can also allow the same page and content to be presented in different styles. CSS specifies a priority scheme to determine which style rules apply if more than one rule matches against a particular element, hence the term "cascading." With "cascading," priorities or weights are calculated and assigned to rules, so that the presentation results are predictable.

CSS addresses many of the problems of HTML. Some of the older tags, especially the notorious <FONT> tag, clutter web page source code and make for inflexible sites. With CSS, style information is centralized, leading to increased power and flexibility. ...