Planning your CSS doesn’t need to be as rigorous as the HTML. First you need to have a separate style for each division box. Each style can have multiple attributes such as box dimensions, background color and images, and text and link styles. The CSS can also control the style of individual HTML tags such as image tags, links, lists and list items etc… You can see what tags are available for use and what they do in the Dreamweaver help menu.

Once you have determined what all styles you are going to define start deciding what their attributes are going to be. Remember that these styles are inherited from the parent to the child. Any attributes you decide will be in the “body” will pass down to the “wrapper,” and so on unless you redefine a specific attribute. Styles defined in sibling divisions such as header, footer, and content will not affect each other, only divisions nested in one another.

At this point it is neccisary to pay attention to the user once again. When you are selecting dimen

At this point it is necessary to pay attention to the user. When you are selection dimensions for boxes it is important to know how much space you have to work with. You should decide what screen resolution you are going to design for, many screens are 1024 by 768 pixels in size. Older computers generally have less pixels and newer computers more. Be sure that your site isn’t moving outside of your user’s screen area. For this site I’m making the assumption that if you have a reason to be making a web site you are probably using a computer with a higher resolution, so I have optimized my page layout for you.

The second factor you are going to want to take into consideration is text and the user’s ability to define a different size from their browser. At this point most browsers don’t work well with dimensions defined in percentages. But once they do, programming box dimensions in percentages will allow them to grow when text size changes and it makes designing sites specifically for lower resolutions automatic.

For now I would recommend defining the widths to a specific pixel dimension and leaving as many boxes as possible defined as “auto” for the height. This will allow boxes to grow up and down as text gets bigger and smaller.