It's the one word that strikes fear into the heart of developers: style. They think it's a field for right-brain dominant artists. They treat color theory, typography, and whitespace as a foreign language. They long to push these tasks onto a web designer and focus on algorithms and API calls.

Many small firms, government agencies, and departments don't have the luxury of having a web designer on their staff, or even on call. These small organizations tend to consist of one or more people hired for their technical and analytical skills, while design skills are left as an afterthought. Maybe you're working for one of those right now.

While this chapter may not turn you into an instant web designer, it will help you use CSS to effectively lay out your web map applications.

In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics: