Using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) .

Cascading style sheets can save you a lot of time (when making changes to a large site) and insure that your use of type faces and other design elements remains consistent throughout your site. (It also speeds up creation of new pages, thus saving you time.) A cascading style sheet is basically a way of taking the code that tells your pages how to look, and putting it in a central location where all your web site files can refer to it. Update the style sheet and you can change the look of your whole web site in an instant. As a bonus, CSSs will make your web site load faster in your visitors' browser.

Follow these steps to create and start using a Cascading Style Sheet.

You can create style sheets from scratch or you can cheat (like I do) and let Dreamweaver do the work.

Start by deciding how certain elements, such as paragraph headings and body text, should look.

Once you have decided that you like what you see, go to the code view.

You'll find that Dreamweaver has auto magically created styles based on what attributes you have developed on your page. In this case, we have a style1 and a style2 - the default Dreamweaver names. Note how they are applied as a "class" in the code.

You may wish to rename the default names to something easy to remember like "BodyText" or "Heading." Be sure to change it in both the style section and the area where it is applied (the "class" tags).

Highlight the styles as shown (from the first period to the last curly-brace) and cut them from the page.

Your page will instantly become ugly again with default fonts and colors. But don't worry.

Go to File/New... and find the dialog shown. Select Basic page and CSS. Then, click Create.

Paste the style in formation you cut from your original document into the newly created file. (Don't worry about the line numbers.)

Then, save the page with the .CSS extension to your project folder.

Now, go back to your original page and connect the page to your style sheet.

At the bottom of the page, click on the pop-up next to Style and choose Attach Style Sheet...

Locate the style sheet in your project folder and click Choose.
At the next dialog click OK and viola! Your page has returned to its original beauty!
Now, every time you create a new page, start by linking it to your style sheet. Then, you can just select styles from the Styles pop-up at the bottom of the page. Think of all the time you'll save!