Make your website with CSS

Make your website  with CSS

Responsive design isn’t just about screen size; it also means adapting to different media 

• Knowledge needed: Intermediate CSS, basic HTML
• Requires: Text editor, web browser, printer or PDF-generator-as-printer
• Project Time: 2-4 hours
• Support file

Many eons ago, in the long-forgotten time of table-based web page layouts, web developers had access to a feature of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that enabled authors to specify a media type. This media type told the browser when to apply styles to the page – whether for screen, handheld, or even print.

This was back in 1998: browsers adopted some of these features (such as print) and as time moved on, forward-thinking developers began to make their table-based layouts printable. Some of the page elements were removed in order to save paper and ink, even making adjustments to layouts to better fit a piece of paper at a fixed size.

Today table-based layouts have been nearly replaced with div-based constructs and, for those using the HTML5 specifications, other structural and semantic elements. One of the key benefits of this approach is that CSS is generally being used to define the layout of web pages, enabling more latitude for re flowing and reformatting already-coded pages with only CSS changes.

This flexibility has also led to the rise of responsive web design (RWD), which makes it easier for a web page to adapt to different screen sizes based on CSS using conditional logic. Over the last three years we have seen the development of frameworks, templates, tutorials – and even parodies – that mean developers of nearly any skill level are able to create pages that can adapt themselves to just about any screen size a developer wants to support. Content can re flow; navigation can adjust; elements can shift in size and position; typography tweaks itself – and so on.

This method of building is perfect for enabling a developer to support the printed page with little additional effort. Except for some reason you don’t see many of these resources including or even considering the printed page.


Hopefully this tutorial will give you enough comfort with making print styles that you’ll be able to add them to any project without blowing up your budget.

Step 01. Getting started

First of all, let’s consider how printed pages from a site compare with their source web pages:

We all know web pages can scroll indefinitely, but a printed page is limited by the paper size, and potentially by how much paper a user is willing to expend. Printed pages are also a strictly visual medium, whereas a web page can have video, audio, and even accessibility features facilitating tactile feedback. Web pages can represent both bitmap data (photos, graphics) and vector data (typography, SVG), but once it is printed it’s all just bitmap data on paper. A web page is interactive, allowing for elements on the screen to change, whereas a printed page won’t be doing much changing short of the use of water or fire. It’s handy to keep all this in mind, because these points inform the decisions you make about the content on the printed page (Do I need to show audio controls? How do I address image cyclers? Is my footer too massive to even fit on a sheet of paper?).

For this demonstration I am going to use my personal website as an example (it rewards my ego and keeps me from pitching my company to you). I know from experience that the pages most likely to be printed from my site are the articles and my bio. I’ll keep my ego somewhat in check by using an old article page to start.