As number of people are attracting towards the creativity, Web design has become an emerging platform every year. Rather than concentrating on just design enhancing your skills in HTML/CSS will be beneficial while frontend development. Designer should gain the knowledge of browser support, content nesting, and code organization.
If you are looking for suggestions on how to build a cleaner and more organized stylesheet then look no further!
Comment sections & chapters
Whenever you start developing new project which require a lot of work, you start writing detailed chapter segments into CSS. You can use code names which are easily searchable organized by a table of contents.
You can give each section an own unique numeric code relevant to your content. You can add another comment at the top of every section having chapter name. To quickly jump right to that chapter section , you can call CTRL+F search for the particular chapter ID. If you are planning to use stylesheet sections , you must take into the consideration that chapter’s are not effective in stylesheets which are compressed with all the whitespaces removed.
Consistent spacing
Understanding the approach of your stylesheet from the beginning is valuable as different selectors will have different requirements for the number of properties.
Most of the developers prefer inline code as it doesn’t use much space between specific properties so you could leave out spaces between the colon and the semi-colon. Whereas block-level properties use one property per line syntax. You can easily recognize the differences between the selectors and properties with this type of formatting. It is better to use block-level styles for selectors which are having 5 or more properties as 4 or less properties can be streamlined onto one line.
Naming conventions
The class and ID names of the project certainly an important topic of discussion. You should be mention relevant names to the project itself . Make every effort to build a system where class & ID names are relatively simple and easy to understand. So it will help others
Whether you are using HTML5 elements or div tags , it will impact the structure of your CSS. You need to learn a lot of things by studying other complete and flawless websites
Expanded or minified code
Minified or compressed CSS files are without whitespaces which leads to unreadable mess. CTRL+F search functionality helps you to find out the exact bit of code little easier to edit.
Expanded version of the stylesheets is much easier to edit as each selector with it property is visible to you. It’s better to use expanded stylesheet if you are editing files and making twists in files very frequent, though the file size is larger to some extent but editable.
It is better to choose the best method while structuring your own stylesheet which is depends on the size difference and the objective of the website. If you are coming up with new blog which will be updated regularly, you must use the usual stylesheet syntax. As WordPress themes take information directly from the stylesheet and if you are able to read at first sight it is such simpler to edit styles from WordPress. You can use free tools such as Clean CSS or Minify CSS available on web to compress the styles which leads to reduce the filesize.
Seperation of files
You can split the different stylesheets changes such as you can create one css file which have all the information of the page layout and hierarchy. Splitting the stylesheets will help to reduce the unnecessary weight onto the particular page.
For example, for the video player interface, you might create a seperate stylesheet which is only for pages which are having videos. As adding video player CSS code into main stylesheet increase the page load time of the pages which don’t have a video player,so it must be placed only on the video player page.
If you have huge blocks of code which must to be separated, then its better to use multiple stylesheets.
It is obvious that you will face a number of problems from the beginning of creating a new file till you complete the entire project. But these problems will be reassured easily as you become a more well versed with CSS.