• Home
  
• Copyright Law
  
• Oragami Elephant
  
• The Dragon King
  
• Donate
• Modularization Plan
• Site Plan
  
• Style Guide
• Learning Report 1
• Learning Report 2
• Learning Report 3
• Learning Report 4
• Learning Report 5
• Learning Report 6
• Learning Report 7
• Learning Report 8
• Colophon

Learning Report #8
Using CSS to make a styled footer including new link colors

The resource I used was a tutorial from http://forum.mambo-foundation.org/showthread.php?t=8580

What I learned

In CSS there is special syntax that is needed when changing the color of a link. It is also a little more complicated then simply specifying the color of the link though because what you really need to do is specify the color of an unclicked link, the color of a clicked link, and the color of a link when you hover over it.

Setting the look of your footer is important because:

• You can give it a look that goes along with your site.
• It uses the principles of PARC because hopefully the information on your footer is all connected, so they should look their own way. If your less important footer links that you want to be sort of out of the way down at the bottom of the page look the same as the navigation, it says to the user that they are equally important when they may not be.
• It automatically is done across the whole site with one update.
• The css validates.

How I stylized my footer

The first thing I did was change the font that I used on my footer. Fonts on the footer are traditionally smaller (so I made the font size smaller) and I used colors that grabbed your attention less than a bright purple link at the bottom of the page. I also used a font family that is more plain.

One issue I ran into while doing my footer was that I at first did not set the color of clicked and unclicked links as well as a scroll over color, but I then fount the syntax and did it.