CSS as we go deeper and deeper it gets harder and harder to understand, especially margins, padding and floats could be confusing at times as well. I am going to post here the tutorial to make a very simple CSS website layout (skeleton) with

- Container
- Header
-Top Navigation Menu
- Left Navigation Menu
- Right Navigation menu
- Content Part
- Footer

All elegantly stacked one by one with divs and with css stylesheet. This is a very basic skeleton. The most important css code are highlighted in the picture. The basic concept is shown below.

Code Flow
Notice carefully the div stacked. A container holds all those header, content, and menus.

<div id=container>
      <div id="header">
        <h2>Header</h2>
      </div>
    <div id="topnav-container">
        <ul id="topnav">
        <li> <a href="#">Home</a> </li>
        <li> <a href="#">Categories</a> </li>
        <li> <a href="#">Services</a> </li>
        <li> <a href="#">About us</a> </li>
        <li> <a href="#">Contact us</a> </li>
        </ul>
    </div>
     <div id="leftnav">
      This is a left navigation bar.
      This is a left navigation bar
      This is a left navigation bar
     </div>
     <div id="rightnav">
      This is a right navigation bar
     </div>
     <div id="content">
         <p>
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam
</p>
     </div>
     <div id="footer">
        <h2>Footer</h2>
     </div>
   </div>

CSS Code

The CSS code is shown below for the above skeleton.

#container {
    margin: 10px auto;
    width: 95%;
    border: 1px solid gray;
}
#header {
    padding: 3px;
    border-bottom: 1px solid gray;
}
#topnav-container {
border-bottom: 1px solid gray;
padding: 4px 0;
background: #e0e0e0;
}

#topnav {
margin:0;
padding: 0;
}

#topnav li  {
    display: inline;
   list-style: none;

}
#topnav li a {

    text-decoration: none;
    padding: 0px 5px;
    color: #333;

}

#leftnav {
    float: left;
    width:150px;
    padding: 5px;
    margin:0;

}
#rightnav {
    width: 150px;
    float:right;
    padding: 5px;
    margin:0;

}
#content
{
    margin: 0 180px 0 180px;
    padding: 1em;
    border-left: 1px solid gray;
    border-right: 1px solid gray;
    font-family:  "Times New Roman",sans-serif ,arial, helvetica;
    font-size: 1.0em;
    line-height: 1.6em;

}
#footer {
    clear:both;
    padding: 0 3px;
    border-top: 1px solid gray;

}

Download source code:3colcsstut.zip

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