Formatting our page directly by using the formatting tools is all very well, but in larger sites or sites that are maintained by more than one person, it can be difficult to maintain a consistent look and feel of all the pages in the site. This is where Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) comes in. It allows us to define the styles we will use in one central place and then to apply those styles to the elements on our pages.

Working with Styles in SharePoint Designer involves three separate task panes:

When formatting our page, the style information was stored within the head section of the HTML of the page. A far better way to store our styles is to have them in one central style sheet so that we can use our styles on any page of our site.

To centralize our styles, we create a style sheet where the styles will be specified. We will do this now by going to File | New | CSS.

The first thing we are going to do is save this empty style sheet...