Here’s The Lowdown On Advanced CSS And Why You Should Care

If you’ve been digging into the tech world, you’ve almost certainly heard the term CSS, aka Cascading Style Sheets. And you probably know that, while HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is what gives web pages their content and structure, CSS is what gives them their style via layouts, colors, fonts, and so much more.

Because it plays such an important role in building the web, CSS is a fundamental skill you simply have to get right to get started in tech. But what if you’ve already mastered the basics of CSS? Is your styling fun done? Not hardly! It’s the perfect time to take your skills—and your chance of landing a high-paying job—to the next level with more advanced CSS.

This article will help you understand what advanced CSS is, what it’s used for, and how it can make you a better developer or designer. You’ll also find out what’s essential to know to get in on the advantages of advanced CSS. And finally, you’ll learn how you can start learning advanced CSS so you can be ready with the skills you need now.

Advanced CSS is a set of tools and techniques that help you create the modern websites that employers and clients are looking for. These skills help you make websites more responsive more easily so, whatever kind or size of device someone is using to view your site, it looks fantastic and works well. No more overlapping images or tiny text!

Advanced CSS also allows you to structure your web pages more efficiently. That means you can forget floats but still position and align elements exactly the way you want and have your content flexibly change size or location just the way you need it to. Or you can use advanced CSS to completely customize a site by styling only certain elements or automatically adapting content.

Not only will advanced CSS skills make it possible for you to build and style the kinds of sites that are most in demand nowadays, but they’ll also let you do it more quickly, easily, and efficiently. You’ll be able to get more done with less code, and the code you do write will be more understandable and organized, so you’ll be able to work better both on your own and on a team.

There are two keys to advanced CSS: Flexbox and CSS Grid. In a nutshell, Flexbox and CSS Grid are layout systems that help you structure web pages, control where things are placed and aligned, and easily adapt to different devices and screen sizes.

Flexbox can be used to arrange elements in columns or rows and align them on the page. It also has functions that automatically lay out content in response to different screen sizes and grow or shrink your content based on other elements on the page. You can even use Flexbox properties to choose exactly which part of a web page is affected by your code.

CSS Grid, on the other hand, can be used for layouts of both columns and rows—and much much more! It gives you the power to decide both the position and the order of everything on your site. And it can make your work as a developer simpler with its “automagical” layouts for dynamic content. And, best of all, you can use either Flexbox or CSS Grid to create your amazing new sites, or you can combine them to get the benefits of both.

The first step to advanced CSS is a good understanding of CSS. That doesn’t mean you need to be a styling wizard, but you do need to know the ins and outs of HTML5 and how to use CSS to style it. If that’s all new for you, the Skillcrush Front End Developer course is a perfect way to to learn how to code sites from scratch plus the basics of responsive web development and JavaScript and jQuery. Or, if you’d like to learn HTML and CSS, responsive web development and web design, the Skillcrush Web Designer course is right for you.

And, for your next step in web development, our soon-to-be-launched advanced CSS course will teach you all the latest and greatest tips and tricks so you can create sites that stand out from the crowd and help you land the job you’ve been dreaming of!

This article was written by Kelli Smith and originally appeared on Skillcrush.