Getting my head around styles

Hi chaps, I am reading the reference and am slowly getting the idea of ‘styles’ but am a little confused so some gentle guidance please. I, sort of, understand what h1 etc tags are and that they’re pretty important to SEO and have started styling my site (too late I now know I should have done it at the start) so have been tidying up and deleting styles that fw has created and replacing them with edited F1, P, and strong tags. All seems well, I have several pages with ‘headers’ and paragraphs so I’ve applied these styles, I then had a page with a bit of text on which wasn’t either a header or a paragraph so edited the ‘strong’ tag so I could use that, the text for strong is now red. There are also some nav buttons with text on them, when I highlite them they now seem to have the ‘strong’ style as well as their original style (style5) - hence my confusion, why has fw styled them with my newly edited strong style, I just want them, I think, to have a style of their own and not share it with the ‘strong’ style. This probably reads as total gobbledegook (how do you spell that word) but if anyone understands it please let me know (or point me in the direction of some learning resources) Best Roger


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Hi Roger
I think this area of freeway is probably has the most un-freeway feel to any part of the application that I know, and I think it comes down to freeway’s history.

In the past I would have created a HTML box, bunged in some text, whacked the size up and down changed the colours, ranged the text right, changed the leading, had a a quick look at it in preview and then maybe changed it again…etc etc fantastically easy… and in the back ground freeway is creating the styles for you which is great because you can concentrate on the design rather than the construction…

BUT and its a big BUT

by then end of your build you will end up with an absolute shed load of styles and they all are called style with a number after them. Trying to sift through these styles to make more sense of them after the event is really painfull

As an example you may have one style which is

style1 which is text alignment of center

then another style called style2 which has text alignment of center and also has bold

third style which is style3 could be as above but this time it has text alignment of center and its red

Now if you can imagine you start to quickly build up dozens of styles that have small differences between them for different areas of your site.

Now if you started off by constructing a style properly within edit styles and then using that style when you need it, you could build up all these slightly different styles by either adding elements or removing them.

For example in the example I mentioned above, I would construct a set of styles that I can use over and over and over on different text.
So the first style I would probably construct in this scenario is a general body style which would have the basic font I want for the site and the the general size
so any text that isn’t styled would default to this.

Next I would create a style called red and this would just have the colour red assigned to it. So now I could highlight any text in my artwork and add the colour red to any specific word just by using the styles inspector.

If I needed a word to be bold and red I would first highlight the word add the red style via the style inspector and then add the strong style, this would then add this style under the red style inside the inspector pallette.
Another group of words may need to be coloured red and italic… so I would highlight them use the style red and then use the em style which will now make the text italic and red.

you should see how this builds up in the styles pallet and how simple the style sheet will be

So the result of this careful thought is Freeway doesn’t have to create hundreds of styles for different permutations of a few basic things.

The down side to creating styles in this neat and tidy way is its sloooowwww because you cant let things slip once freeway creates temporary styles you wont know where they are used and how they are used.

I don’t build all my styles in this way lots are specific, but I do try to work out what I need before constructing my artwork, I name them with meaningful names and if something crops up that I haven’t accounted for then I create a specific style.

Now to some specific problems… if you use any of the H tags in your styles sheet/ artwork, browsers will automatically add the bold for you unless, you tell them not to…so you will need to open the style click on extended, add font-weight to the name and then add normal to the value. This will then tell the browsers that you do not want bold to be used unless of course you add it by attaching strong.

Anyway this was going to be a quick answer to your question but I seemed to have rambled on a bit… but if you have a link to a page with your specific problems it would be handy to see it.

I hope this helps kind regards max


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Well Max - I don’t think you rambled, quite the contrary, you’ve really made the styles thing a lot more understandable and when I build my next site I will follow your example and try and work nice and tidily (not really in my nature but I’ll give it a go).

It obviously makes sense to organise the styles and from what I can gather, it improves SEO.

Again thanks so much for taking the time.

Have a good weekend - Roger


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I forgot to add - here’s the site, very much under construction, any comments much appreciated. Roger

http://www.rogerburton.co.uk/ethelburt_avenue/index.html


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