How To Style the Body of a Website With CSS

In this tutorial, you will style the body of a webpage with a CSS rule. You will use this rule to apply and style a background image and set the font family for the webpage. You will also create a style rule that changes the color of all hyperlinked text to a color that better matches the demonstration website’s color palette.

This exercise will be used to recreate the style of the demonstration site but you can apply and modify the same rules used here for other HTML/CSS website projects.

Prerequisites

To follow this tutorial, make sure you have set up the necessary files and folders as instructed in a previous tutorial in this series How To Set Up You CSS and HTML Practice Project.

For this tutorial, we suggest you use the background image from the demonstration site which you can download from this link. You may use another image as your background, but make that sure that the image is large enough to fill the screen.

Note: To download the background image of the demonstration site, visit this link and click CTRL + Left Click (on Macs) or Right Click (on Windows) on the image and select “Save Image As” and save it as background-image.jpeg to your «image’ folder.

Once you have selected an image, make sure it’s saved as “background-image.jpeg” in your images folder. You are now ready to proceed to the next step.

Adding a Background Image To Your Website With CSS

To declare style rules for the body of a webpage, you will need to create a CSS rule for the body tag selector. These rules will then be applied to all elements that are placed inside the opening and closing tags that you added to the index.html file in the earlier tutorial How To Set Up Your CSS and HTML Website Project.

To add a background image to your site, create a CSS rule using the tag selector. Erase everything in your styles.css file (if you have been following along with this series) and add the following ruleset:

/* General Website Style rules */ body  font-family: "Helvetica", Sans-Serif; background-image: url("../images/background-image.jpeg"); > 

Take note of the highlighted file path, which tells the browser where to locate the background image. If you have changed the name or location of the image then you will need to adjust the file path here accordingly.

Let’s pause briefly to understand each of the declarations in this ruleset:

• /* General Website Style rules */ is a CSS comment, which is not displayed by the browser. Like HTML comments, CSS comments are useful for explaining and organizing your code for future reference. Notice that CSS comments open and close with /* and */ tags instead of tags used for HTML comments.
• The font-family: «Helvetica», Sans-Serif; declaration sets the font family (Helvetica) and generic font family (Sans-Serif) for all the text on the webpage. (Note that you can specify different font families for text content on the same webpage by adding CSS rules later on). The generic font family is given as a backup in case the first font family isn’t available and the browser needs to pick a back up font. You can explore other fonts by replacing “Helvetica” with other font names, such as Times , Courier , or Palatino .
• The background-image: url(» ../images/background-image.jpeg ;») declaration tells the browser to add a background image to the webpage using the file found with the specified file path. Note that you have prepended ../ to the file path name to tell the browser to locate the images folder in the directory above the directory that contains the file you are working in ( styles.css ).

Save your styles.css file and load the index.html page in your browser. For instructions on loading an HTML file, please visit our tutorial step How To View An Offline HTML File In Your Browser.

You should receive a page with no content except for the background image:

If you don’t receive an image, check to make sure your file path is correct and that there are no errors in your index.html file and styles.css file.

Changing the Color of Hyperlinked Text

Next, we’ll add a CSS rule that changes the color of all hyperlinked text to a color that better matches the website color palette.

At the bottom of your styles.css file, add the following ruleset:

Conclusion

You should now have a webpage with a large background image. In addition, you declared a font family that will be applied when you begin to add text content. Using rulesets like these allow you to change the font and background image of a webpage by creating a ruleset for the body tag selector. Finally, you created a style rule that specifies the color of any hyperlinked text you add to the page.

In the next tutorial, you’ll recreate the header section of the demonstration website.

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Tutorial Series: How To Build a Website With CSS

This tutorial is part of a series on creating and customizing this website with CSS, a stylesheet language used to control the presentation of websites. You may follow the entire series to recreate the demonstration website and gain familiarity with CSS or use the methods described here for other CSS website projects.

Before proceeding, we recommend that you have some knowledge of HTML, the standard markup language used to display documents in a web browser. If you don’t have familiarity with HTML, you can follow the first ten tutorials of our series How To Build a Website With HTML before starting this series.

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HTML Styles — CSS

CSS saves a lot of work. It can control the layout of multiple web pages all at once.

CSS = Styles and Colors

What is CSS?

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is used to format the layout of a webpage.

With CSS, you can control the color, font, the size of text, the spacing between elements, how elements are positioned and laid out, what background images or background colors are to be used, different displays for different devices and screen sizes, and much more!

Tip: The word cascading means that a style applied to a parent element will also apply to all children elements within the parent. So, if you set the color of the body text to «blue», all headings, paragraphs, and other text elements within the body will also get the same color (unless you specify something else)!

Using CSS

CSS can be added to HTML documents in 3 ways:

• Inline — by using the style attribute inside HTML elements
• Internal — by using a element in the section
• External — by using a element to link to an external CSS file

The most common way to add CSS, is to keep the styles in external CSS files. However, in this tutorial we will use inline and internal styles, because this is easier to demonstrate, and easier for you to try it yourself.

Inline CSS

An inline CSS is used to apply a unique style to a single HTML element.

An inline CSS uses the style attribute of an HTML element.

The following example sets the text color of the element to blue, and the text color of the

element to red:

Example

A Blue Heading

Internal CSS

An internal CSS is used to define a style for a single HTML page.

An internal CSS is defined in the section of an HTML page, within a element.

The following example sets the text color of ALL the elements (on that page) to blue, and the text color of ALL the

elements to red. In addition, the page will be displayed with a «powderblue» background color:

Example

This is a heading

This is a paragraph.

External CSS

An external style sheet is used to define the style for many HTML pages.

To use an external style sheet, add a link to it in the section of each HTML page:

Example

This is a heading

This is a paragraph.

The external style sheet can be written in any text editor. The file must not contain any HTML code, and must be saved with a .css extension.

Here is what the «styles.css» file looks like:

«styles.css»:

Tip: With an external style sheet, you can change the look of an entire web site, by changing one file!

CSS Colors, Fonts and Sizes

Here, we will demonstrate some commonly used CSS properties. You will learn more about them later.

The CSS color property defines the text color to be used.

The CSS font-family property defines the font to be used.

The CSS font-size property defines the text size to be used.

Example

Use of CSS color, font-family and font-size properties:

This is a heading

This is a paragraph.

CSS Border

The CSS border property defines a border around an HTML element.

Tip: You can define a border for nearly all HTML elements.

Example

Use of CSS border property:

CSS Padding

The CSS padding property defines a padding (space) between the text and the border.

Example

Use of CSS border and padding properties:

CSS Margin

The CSS margin property defines a margin (space) outside the border.

Example

Use of CSS border and margin properties:

Link to External CSS

External style sheets can be referenced with a full URL or with a path relative to the current web page.

Example

This example uses a full URL to link to a style sheet:

Example

This example links to a style sheet located in the html folder on the current web site:

Example

This example links to a style sheet located in the same folder as the current page:

You can read more about file paths in the chapter HTML File Paths.

Chapter Summary

• Use the HTML style attribute for inline styling
• Use the HTML element to define internal CSS
• Use the HTML element to refer to an external CSS file
• Use the HTML element to store and elements
• Use the CSS color property for text colors
• Use the CSS font-family property for text fonts
• Use the CSS font-size property for text sizes
• Use the CSS border property for borders
• Use the CSS padding property for space inside the border
• Use the CSS margin property for space outside the border

Tip: You can learn much more about CSS in our CSS Tutorial.

HTML Exercises

HTML Style Tags

Tag	Description
	Defines style information for an HTML document
	Defines a link between a document and an external resource

For a complete list of all available HTML tags, visit our HTML Tag Reference.

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This is a heading

This is a paragraph.

The element contains all the contents of an HTML document, such as headings, paragraphs, images, hyperlinks, tables, lists, etc.

Note: There can only be one element in an HTML document.

Browser Support

Global Attributes

Event Attributes

More Examples

Example

Add a background image to a document (with CSS):

Hello world!

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Example

Set the background color of a document (with CSS):

Hello world!

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Example

Set the color of text in a document (with CSS):

Hello world!

This is some text.

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Example

Set the color of unvisited links in a document (with CSS):

Example

Set the color of active links in a document (with CSS):

Example

Set the color of visited links in a document (with CSS):

Related Pages

Default CSS Settings

Most browsers will display the element with the following default values:

Example

body <
display: block;
margin: 8px;
>

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