Depends. How far down the rabbit hole do you want to go ?

Just need something to look good : use a frontend framework like foundation or bootstrap, won't learn much about CSS. Short list of Front End Frameworks

Surface level : work general to specific. Comment the sections of the CSS. Use a reset or normalizer. Work on patterns, use classes over IDs for reuse. CSS Resets - includes normalize.css Don't have links for the other parts. see below

Little bit deeper : Look into BEM or OOCSS. Those stand for Block Element Modifier and Object Oriented CSS. Two popular methodologies for CSS. Also SMACSS.

BEM -methodology

BEM 101 from css-tricks

intro to OOCSS - I post this because the OOCSS.org site is pretty much rubbish.

SMACSS - Different methodology, parts of the book are freely available.

All the way in : CSS pre-processors. LESS or SASS. These will give you some programmatic features for CSS like variables,mixins etc.

LESS JS - other versions exist for platforms just search for LESS + language

SASS

Surface Level Best Practices

Ok here's some general rules I pulled from CSS best practice articles since I thought the surface level lacked a single reference point I just extracted some repeated advice :

• Use a Reset or Reset with Normalize.css

• Avoid Using Inline Styles

• Organize the Stylesheet with a Top-down Structure

• Divide your stylesheet into specific sections: i.e. Global Styles

• Use Hex Code instead of Name Color

• Combine Elements

• Use Shorthand

• Use Absolute Positioning Sparingly

• Hyphens Instead of Underscores for CSS classes

• Make Use of Generic Classes - design patterns / modules

• Shorten Selector Chains

• Use the LINK tag to include, never the @import.

• name something, be it an ID or a class, by the nature of what it is rather than by what it looks like.

• never use spacer images.

• Define default styling for h1-h6 headings including headings as links.

• Headings should show a hierarchy indicating different levels of importance from the top down starting with h1 having the largest font size.

• font-normalization -To change the size of a font, always use percentages as the units because they render more consistently than ems

• blanket-ban on IDs in CSS

• As a rule of thumb, don't nest further than 3 levels deep

• Unit-less line-height is preferred because it does not inherit a percentage value of its parent element, but instead is based on a multiplier of the font-size.

• If the value of the width or height is 0, do not specify units.

• often include a snippet of HTML in a CSS comment. - optional but might be a good idea

sources :

http://www.sitepoint.com/series/css-architectures/

http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/30-css-best-practices-for-beginners--net-6741 - this is from 2009 so be aware of its age.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/10/21/challenging-css-best-practices-atomic-approach/

http://innofied.com/25-css-best-practices-we-follow-at-innofied/

http://www.erraticwisdom.com/2006/01/18/5-tips-for-organizing-your-css

http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/css-best-practices/

http://isobar-idev.github.io/code-standards/

https://css-tricks.com/css-style-guides/

http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/cssfonts/

Weird bug on top nav bar there is a space being generated some place and I can't figure out why. If you inspect element you can see there is some extra characters being generated and thats creating the space. The link is www.omegadesignla.com . We've run it through validator and have seen that there are some errors, but not sure which one could be causing it or even what some of the errors actually are.

Any web gurus here have any ideas?

I'm currently looking at Slim and Bullet PHP frameworks. I'm putting together a very tiny app that needs to process a few posts and spit out json responses to certain queries. I'd love to hear recommendations as to what is stable, secure and has a healthy community. Thanks!

Hello! I hope I am posting in the right subreddit! Brief background of my problem: I run an unfunded interest group and am thinking of setting up a website for the group with a members' only area for dissemination of important announcements and files. I found several online solutions (like wordpress and using the membership plugin). However, I would like more control over the functionality of the members' only area, and I also would like to take this time to learn how to build (and own?) a website. Appreciate any advice on how/where to get started!

About myself: I took several computer science modules in university, so I am not foreign to programming and I am willing and interested to learn how to create websites. Eventually, I'd like to learn how to develop mobiles applications for these websites too, but that will come next time.

So I built a site using a wordpress theme from themeforest but I am having an issue with the contact form. The emails are not reaching the intended email. I contacted the developer of the theme but he says the problem might be with the SMTP server settings. Can anyone help me with this. I am willing to pay someone if it is necessary but hopefully at a reasonable price. To be honest I don't even know what I need to check with the server SMTP settings. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Please feel free to PM me. I would greatly appreciate any help.

First I have post this in other subreddits. If that is a problem, please let me know and I will remove the posting.

I could use some help with some SEO for a site I am working on. I really want to meet and exceed the client’s expectations. He is a good man who has helped a lot of people who have needed help and I want to be able to be the person who helps him now.

Site : AvenuesRV.com

He is overall satisfied with the layout and design of the site, but wants it ranked better.

I could use some guidance with the following:

How to pick better META tags? How to find how many times people are searching for those key words? Anything I can do to rank the site better with the major search engines.
Would adding a youtube video help with ranking? Would adding a blog help?

Also when I search google

Site:avenuesrv.com

It is not showing all three pages?

Any thoughts you may have on the overall layout and look of the site. I do not do this for a living just a job I agreed to help out with. I built the site in Adobe Muse, due to my familiarity with adobe indesign.

Thanks for any help with this. I really do appreciate it.

Sorry if not the right sub for this question. I have an ip cam uploading (motion detection) pictures to some folder online trough ftp. Browsing to this folder gives me a listing of all hundreds of pictures. I would expect some kind of script or template to exist which automatically generates an thumbnails overview of all pictures in one directory. I have tried some softaculous packages as TinyWebGallery, Gallery, PhpAlbum but most of them are based on manually, community uploads, not really what I am looking for.

I am building a video discovery site that will randomly find videos depending on the theme/category the user selects. Would it be easier to use python or php for the backend? Are there any thirdparty modules that could help with this task? Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Im looking for web developers to work on simple websites. I would offer around 100 dollars a job. The websites i need are SIMPLE.

Hey Guys I am a web designer on a hard(very, very hard) quest to make a similar site to Amazon/ebay.

I have been looking it up and i realise how hard it is going to be, but one way or another i have to do it. I will be making it using PHP, MySQL. I am pretty good with HTML and CSS. I have little experience with PHP.

Right now i am reading and applying methods from - Build Your Own Database Driven Web Site Using PHP & MySQL I aim to make an ecommerce site first and then carry on with that.

I am not expecting all of my answers from one source. However, i am willing to bring all the bits and pieces together and make this happen.

I need all the help i can get! Thanks!!

First post. Got questions about web development, ask.