Freeware

Simple CSS: Making CSS Easier?

By EAN ⋅ October 3, 2007 ⋅  Email this Post ⋅  Print this Post ⋅ Post a Comment

Developer: HostM Web Hosting
Version: 1.21
Price: Free
Operating Systems: Linux, Mac OS X, Windows
Click here to check out Simple CSS

And I Thought CSS Was Already Simple

CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets for those of you with minimal web design experience, was something I always though of as pretty easy. The language is straightforward, everything is well defined. All you have to do to make a decent looking site is plug in the values you want to line up your elements and choose a color palette that will make your site stand out. There are tutorials galore if you get tripped up along the way. I was pretty surprised to see a program like Simple CSS out there when CSS itself is actually pretty simple.

Simple CSS is a program that is made possible by a web hosting company. And no, you don’t have to sign up for their hosting plan in order to get a copy of the program - it’s totally free of charge. Pretty good advertising if you ask me. A web hosting company offering a free program to help build websites.

Anyway, Simple CSS does a nice job making the style sheet creation process as simplistic as can be. Everything in the program is based on drop down menus, check boxes, and text boxes to enter your digits. There’s even a live preview at the bottom so you can see what your changes are doing as you’re making them. And if you’re not sure what’s going on and you need to see some cold hard code, you can view the actual CSS source file with the click of a button.

As easy as Simple CSS tries to be, there is one big problem here. While you can import and export CSS files to your heart’s content, which is great for someone learning CSS for the first time to try and reverse engineer another person’s code, Simple CSS left out what I consider to be a necessary feature. There is no direct editing of the CSS allowed in Simple CSS. I can view the source code - but I can’t change it. That means I have to take an extra step to export my CSS file, open it in a text editor, and then add the stuff that Simple CSS can’t.

This issue limits Simple CSS to only the most basic CSS tasks: text decoration, background alignment, and the occasional relocation of some element on your page. For everything else, it’s much easier to code the style sheet by hand.

If you’ve ever wanted to make your own website and learn CSS, download Simple CSS right now. However, if you have any skill at coding style sheets or you know of some great tutorials out there on the internet, use those instead. Simple CSS is a nice tool, but it is only for beginners.

Click here to check out Simple CSS.

- Eric Norton