Consistency is important throughout a webpage or website. In terms of professional webpage composition, many web developers use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to define the corporate identity that they wish to portray to visitors to their website.

There's nothing worse than a website that mixes fonts and colours and font sizes for no apparent reason.

While it is functional, it doesn't really make for an easy read. You wouldn't do it with a word processed document and you shouldn't do it to your webpages. You can design layouts using page properties but Dreamweaver has added an interesting concept to it's Design pane. The concept is called HTML Styles.

n my personal case, as shown above, I have four styles that I use over and over again when I'm working or refining web pages. Rather than looking things up each time, I define a style. For example, the text in the body of this page is blue (what shade of blue is a good question), in Arial font and no change is made to the font size. In the design window that you see above, you'll note that I've defined a style called "Newsletter".

Often I'll have created text in a word processor and just copy and paste it into the body of a web page when I'm assembling a newsletter. Rather than trying to remember fonts and colours and ..., I just highlight the text and apply the HTML Style called "Newsletter".

In fact, I have four styles that I use over and over. The title boxes are a little bigger, bold, and in italics. Rather than applying each of those attributes when they're needed, I just apply the style.

For the rest of the pages in the GEC Computers in the Classroom site such as the Portal or the Webquest Locator, I use a smaller font with the District's shade of teal applied. There are styles for those as well.

Think of the webpages that you create. Is there a need for a consistent style/font/colour combination? CSS or HTML styles may be just the answer to keep your formatting time to a minimum.

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