11 CSS mistakes every web designer must avoid

CSS forms one of the vital components of your web page’s design that needs to be uniformly maintained in style. As you are aware it stores the minutest style information that is made available for all the various projects and helps you to work wonders without any possibilities of duplication. This is why a web page looks more than incomplete if it does not have CSS.

But as you know a lot of elements on your web page design decides how appealing it is to the person who is accessing it. The users of your CSS are unaware of how the whole logic of CSS works and this is one of the reasons why it appears to be a shock while they are through it because they are just regular people and not front end developers.

And, most of the newbies have no idea of what goes into those CSS scripts that are creating havoc.

Here, we are going to examine all those CSS bad practices that are creating a worst user-experience and it is something that you should be unfollowing today.

#1. Using ID:

Most of the people are into implementing classes which is not a good practice. It is recommended that you implement IDs instead of classes. When you use ID it helps the browser to access DOM components much faster.

#2. Partitioning the CSS file:

It would be a great idea if you could break your CSS file into various portions rather than integrating everything into a single CSS file. You could make it easier to manage your CSS file by partitioning it into various parts such as the footer.css, header.css, and others.

#3. Font-size within the“*” operator is not a good practice:

Most of the new developers and even the existing developers are into the habit of including the font-size property within the “*” operator. This would often result in resetting of the font size while the tags are nested. Consequently, developers would have to include the font size declarations inline as well This causes the script to list a whole host of duplications.

#4. Naming your selectors:

Most of the times people have a habit of naming their selectors “.red-with-green-dashed-lines”!

The naming should be done based on the components and their functionality. This is common-sense. For instance, you could name “content-header”, “content-title” which is more descriptive and explains well what the whole thing is about.

#5. Comments:

It is important to have comments in your CSS. The comments in your CSS describe how a specific style is related to another and the color scheme that is applicable to each of the components.

#6. Dev Tools:

Most of the times people are afraid of using or implementing the Dev Tools! But, each of the browsers have their own set of pre-defined Dev Tools, don’t be afraid to use these. These tools have got a critical role when debugging CSS. You can use these browser enabled tools by pressing F12.

#7. Overriding:

As in the case of implementing Dev Tools, developers are also afraid when it comes to overriding. Most of the CSS frameworks such as the Bootstrap and Foundation are resourceful, but you can customize it as per your needs. Whenever an update is made to the framework your changes will be automatically overridden. You can also create a bootstrap-overrides.css file that helps to customize the CSS file as you wish.

#8. !important is unnecessarily used in most places:

In CSS styles are cascading or overlapping from the top of one to another. But, when you bring down !important in between, it will dominate the others and as the name suggests it will establish that it is important over the others.

#9. Don’t overstock a lot of Web fonts:

You might be very much interested in typography, but CSS is not the place to practice what you are good at. It is a good idea to stick to one or two or maximum of three fonts but you can also stick to the browser defaults which are another approach at keeping your site optimized.

#10. Hand coding is a bad practice:

You can implement CSS preprocessors such as SASS and LESS to ensure that there is no CSS repetition in your programming. The best part of using these preprocessors is that if you define variables such as the color scheme at the top then, you can reuse it through your CSS without having to repeat it all over again.

#11. CSS should not be fat:

The rule of the web is to ensure that no one is ever made to wait and this is why it is suggested that you do not include a lot of entries into your CSS file as it will force it to load slow. It is good if you can use a CSS-minifier to shrink it before deploying to your website.

Now you are very much aware of all the CSS bad practices that you have been following. We are going to take you across some of the CSS best practices that you need to start implementing today and these are the following:

Some of these could be the ones you are already implementing but they are the good ones that you should be really using if you want to ensure that your users are going to have a great experience while they bombard your site:

1. Implementing the CSS table of contents:

It is always a great idea if you could use the CSS table of contents before starting to work on your style sheets. Not only does it help you to keep track of your code but also you can write down your styles in a more efficient manner.

2. How do you ensure that your CSS is readable?

There are two ways you could ensure that your CSS is readable:

1. One line form
2. Standard form

It is necessary to implement either of these best practices to ensure that you can maintain and handle your CSS with a high level of efficiency in the future.

3. Where do you add CSS3 Animations?

It is always recommended that the best CSS practice is to add your CSS3 Animations at the last of your sheet to avoid inconsistency. This actually tells the browser that the CSS basic functions are important and need to load ahead of the animations.

4. Implement Shorthand properties:

You can implement the rules for various CSS properties using the Shorthand properties. Also, it helps to shrink the CSS and enhance the readability.

5. CSS Validations:

You could implement the W3C free CSS Validator to get some help on validating your code and find out the errors.

So, when are you updating your CSS style sheets?

Do you need help with that?

Then, we are here to help you deal with your CSS style sheets.

Acodez IT Solutions is a web development company in India offering all kinds of web design and development solutions to our clients in India and abroad If you are looking for someone who could help you with the digital marketing side of your business, then, we can help you with that because we have experience at handling inbound marketing. For more details, you can contact us today.