A well-designed website layout helps in making your site recognize as a distinguished identity from the other sites available over the web. However, to create such a design you need to consider several aspects. Most importantly, you’ll have to work with the stylesheet to give your website design a more polished look. In a nutshell, you need to rely upon your theme’s CSS to make changes to your design aesthetics.
When it comes to writing CSS for any WordPress website, users, whether beginners or experienced tend to make some common CSS mistakes that should be avoided at all costs.
Through this post, I would like to bring to your notice the most common CSS mistakes you might commit when working with your WordPress site CSS file.
Regardless of how creative you may be as a theme developer, it’s tad too easy for you to make spelling errors. When working on a project in a hurried manner, we often aren’t able to look for any missed spelling errors. For instance, when setting up a margin in your stylesheet or any other attribute, you may write ’11ps’ instead of ’11px’. Thankfully, CSS validators helps to catch any of the minor mistakes that we make while writing CSS for our WP site.
No matter, how much time or efforts you’re putting into writing a CSS, you cannot avoid to abide by the ground rules. In simple words, when working with a CSS file, you should have familiarity with all of its basic concepts (such as selectors). If not, you’ll most likely end up making mistakes at the time of declaring a “CSS selector” property. When defining a CSS selector, it should be defined either using an ID or CLASS unless it’s not an HTML tag.
Let’s have a look at the format you need to follow to define each CSS selector, as shown below:
{ property: value; property: value; }Let’s consider, for example, creating an element selector:
p {
text-align: justify;
color: gray;
}
As you can see that the element selector in the code above, is used for defining two properties together with some values: “text-align: justify” and “color: gray”. In addition, colons, semi-colons and braces are used. Your CSS won’t work in case you miss out any of these little details. But luckily, CSS validators can also help in letting you know about such small forgotten details.
In spite of how well you may have designed a layout using CSS, it may not work as you’ve envisioned. One possible reason could be that you’ve inserted your design in some wrong selector. For example, it’s easy to mistakenly place your design in “#content” when it actually needs to be added within “#context-text”. To resolve this issue, simply cut and paste your design in the right selector. And then, it is recommended that you should delete the website design placed in the wrong selector section.
Note: Make sure to keep a backup of your original file, as it will save you from losing your work.
No doubt, WordPress modular templates are a lot useful, but when modifying them often developers tend to make the updates in the wrong module section of the template. For instance, you may make modifications to the file ‘comments.php’ file when the modifications need to be made to ‘comments-new.php’ file. Therefore, it becomes necessary to carefully check out the template module section that needs to be updated. However, in case you override the data of a file, running a backup will help you restore the file to its original form.
At times, we often use the same information for two or more references. But, CSS can’t decide the right reference it should use. This can result in errors. You may encounter this situation while trying to use current CSS stylesheet just above the new one.
When it comes to making changes to a WordPress website layout, you’ll have to work with the CSS file. But prior to getting started, make sure to learn about the common mistakes you can make while writing the CSS. I hope that reading this post will help you become familiar with the common mistakes that you can make when working with your WordPress website stylesheet.
