How To Build A Website With CSS: A DigitalOcean Workshop Kit

Introduction

This project-based tutorial series will introduce you to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), a stylesheet language used to control the presentation of websites, by building a personal website using our demonstration site as a model. Though our demonstration site features Sammy the Shark, you can switch out Sammy’s information with your own if you wish to personalize your site.

Alongside HTML and JavaScript, CSS is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web. If you have some understanding of HTML and are looking to grow your front-end development skills, learning CSS is a great next step.

The first half of this tutorial series will introduce CSS through hands-on exercises and the second half of the tutorial series will provide steps for recreating the demonstration website. If you want to start building the demonstration website right away, you can start with the tutorial How To Set Up Your CSS and HTML Website Project and proceed from there.

By the end of this CSS tutorial series, you will have files ready for deploying a website to the cloud, as well as an understanding of how to continue modifying the site’s design with HTML and CSS. You will also have a foundation for learning additional front-end web development skills (such as JavaScript) and frameworks (like Tailwind).

Prerequisites

• A code editor like Visual Studio Code or Atom. This series will use Visual Studio Code as our default code editor but you may use any code editor you like. Certain instructions may need to be slightly modified if you use a different editor.

• A web browser like Firefox or Chrome. This tutorial series will use Firefox as our default browser but you may use any browser you like. Certain instructions may need to be slightly modified if you use a different web browser.

• Two different profile photos, images, or avatars for personalizing your site (optional).

• Familiarity with HTML. If you aren’t familiar with HTML or would like a refresher, you can follow the first ten tutorials of our series How To Build a Website With HTML before starting this series.

Once you have your prerequisites ready, you will be ready to begin the workshop. Follow along with the speaker slides and the online tutorial series for copyable code snippets, conceptual overviews, and additional HTML lessons and tips for further customizing your project website.