Style Master: Complex CSS Coding Made Easy 'De-Complicating' the World of Cascading Style Sheets Lee Underwood
Using Cascading Style Sheets to lay out a Web page can be a little complicated. Just placing a navigation bar and content box can sometimes get downright difficult. While a few of the WYSIWYG HTML editors provide visual CSS authoring, many Web designers prefer to code by hand. And many of the WYSIWYG editors that do offer CSS tools lack extensive CSS authoring capabilities.
Designed to work along side your current HTML/CSS editor, Style Master (formerly called Layout Master) can help solve the problem. It's a powerful editing tool from the creators of Style Master CSS Editor that's designed to aid in the creation of standards-based XHTML and CSS Web pages.
To paraphrase from the program's manual, using Style Master is pretty straightforward. It's basically a matter of adding elements to a page, dragging them where you want them, and then stretching and shrinking them as desired. While there are editors within the program to fine tune the code, the app will also work with your current HTML and CSS editor, even while you are working within Style Master.
A short yet comprehensive tutorial is included with the software and will have you up and running in no time. Within a half hour of using the tutorial, I was able to create a Web page (at right) with a fixed background image (the image doesn't scroll as the page does), a header across the top with a plain white background, a navigation bar at the top and bottom (the bottom one is fixed), a center box with text, and a text-filled box on the left-hand side surrounded by graphics. The page won't win any design awards, but it does show how Style Master can help make page layouts a little easier. The HTML and CSS code also properly validated.
