Free CSS Tutorials & Web Design Templates

As I said in my post Don't Let Your Domain Name Expire I recently purchased my domain internetsecurity101.net back for $300 from sedo.com.  To make a long story short, last year I lost my domain by letting it expire and by not renewing my domain.  Thus, someone else purchased internetsecurity101.net.  Through the domain name broker sedo.com the new owner sold internetsecurity101.net back to me.

To make matters worse, my previous laptop's hard drive crashed.  I had made the mistake of not having a CD backup of my web site(a mistake that I'll not make again).  I was not able to recover any of the data on my hard drive, including my web site.

Thankfully, I found an archived copy of my web site Internet Security 101 on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

I want to use the same CSS template from Open Source Web Design that I used before.  You can find many sites with free web design templates by doing a search on the subject with your favorite web browser.  I personally really like oswd.org, which has 2080 web design templates, contributed by its members.  You can download the templates free of charge, like I've done.  In return, all they ask is that you link back to oswd.org.  The later is not required though.

However, in order to modify and change the design I need to learn some CSS.  For example, I want to modify the CSS style sheet so that the header image and title doesn't reload for every page of my site the user visits.  I've build a few websites over the years using HTML, but my knowledge of CSS is very limited to say the least.  Actually, to be honest it is more like my knowledge of CSS is nil.

I wrote a post in the most friendly and helpful webmaster forum that I have found, called Website Babble, asking for advice on where to find good CSS tutorials.

So far, I've received a few recommendations for where to find CSS tutorials.

Lisa, the owner Website Babble and 2CreateaWebSite, suggests to learn CSS I check out W3Schools Online Web Tutorials.  By briefly viewing their home page, it looks like this site certainly does have an abundance of basic to advance web site building tutorials, including learning CSS. 

A couple of other members of Website Babble recommend a book called  Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML.  I need to do just that - dive head first into learning CSS!  James says that this book is "one of the best."  He went on to say that "on most pages you find what looks like hand written notes with arrows pointing out important parts of code, and other similar notations."  He also says that " it deals directly with the things you really want to know to build your web pages."  Amazon.com's 239 custumer reviews of Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML average 4 1/2 stars.

I know you might be saying, "I thought you said this post was on Free CSS Tutorials & Templates and books aren't free."  Well, if you check them out from your local Public Library they are indeed free.  That's exactly what I plan on doing.

I will certainly be spending some time checking out the above resources to learn some basic CSS, so I make modifications and changes to my free web site template.  Who knows, perhaps I'll learn some other helpful and useful web site building tips.