Google is just the most darned amazing tutorial service in human history. A few years ago when I adopted WordPress for my blogging platform the WordPress forums for getting questions answered were so convoluted I just wanted to scream in frustration. Thank goodness, Google has expanded it’s indexing to cover pretty much every subject. And fortunately more people are contributing helpful hints on all subjects especially those of us in the realms of blogging, web design, software engineering and animation.

I found a few great links that are helping me learn some quick Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) formatting tips using a few fundamental HTML commands. It’s been a good refresher as I now know how to center an image or shift it left or right, and how to wrap text around a picture. In these examples I’ll use the Blacks Gone Geek icon to illustrate the examples.

Here’s how it looks using straight HTML.

<center>Image file HTML goes here</center>

When I use the new CSS method that WordPress has incorporated I shouldn’t see any difference than when I use the traditional HTML method above.

<div class="cent">
<strong>Image file HTML goes here</strong>
</div>

Success! Of course more text between images always keeps things neatly spaced even when a style sheet is helping the alignment in the background.

But what I really want to accomplish is lining up an image to the right or left as I please. To begin, here’s my effort to align an image to the right by adding the right alignment command. The picture has been repositioned to the right and the text now wraps around the left side of it. As I continue to type the text should wrap around the bottom of the picture and continue. So Let’s just see if that really is the case as I continue from this point to type nonsensical sentences just to fill up the space to test the programming technique behind the scenes in the WordPress editing panel. Ah, success again!

So aligning an image to the left would be slightly different, merely changing the align command to left, rather than right. And as you might imagine if you were typing nonsenical gobbledygook (yes, that’s how it’s spelled) to test a programming concept you would allow your fingers to ramble across the keyboard just as I’m doing now. And were we succesful? Yes a third time.

So there’s a hint of what you can do with good CSS scripting. It’s literally custom made to control the layout design of your page and it applies to much more than the images you use. To learn more about it I also encourage you to read “HTML, XHTML, and CSS” by Rob Huddleston which I have found to be immensely helpful in getting me up to speed on all things CSS related. Hope you found this helpful and if so share the post with a friend.