Cascading Style Sheets are one way to get control of the text in your documents. Of course you could just use the Property Inspector or Page Properties to modify your text but CSS will allow you more global changes once you become comfortable with its features.
There are 2 style sheets categories.
Dreamweaver lets you create 3 types of styles:
1. Open a new Dreamweaver document and name the file style.htm. Take a look at your Propery Inspector.
. Since this is a brand new document and you haven't created text or made any changes to it you will notice the Style menu is set for None or the default settings. Type your Name and change the font, color, size and alignment of your name. Once you do that your style menu is keeping track of your changes. You should see it change to 
Nancy Errico
2. View your Dreamweaver document in the Code mode and you should see some changes to your head tag.
3. As you begin to create different styles you may not want them to be name Style1, Style2, Style3, etc. You may want to rename them. If you select the Style menu you see a place where you can rename your styles. Please rename one or two of your styles.
4. Let's say you have a style you like and you want to apply it to other text. Just select the text you want to change and then find your desired style in the style menu on the properties inspector. Try it out.
5. Now it's time to explore the CSS menu. Select Window in the menu bar then CSS Styles. You will see a window with your different styles. The four icons on the lower right bottom are very important. The first bottom on the left is to attach an external style sheet. The second is create new style sheets. The third (with the pencil) is to edit style sheets. The fourth icon with the trash can is to delete style sheets.
6. Click the "New..." button. Type in .bodytext (you must keep the period before the Name). Click in the Class button and make sure This document only is selected.
7. Now you play. Change the Font, the size, the color and the style.
8. This custom made style or class will now appear in your Properties Style menu and your CSS window listing the internal styles available for this document.
Select your new class - .bodytext and start typing to see what happens.
9. What if you wanted to redefine some basic html tags we learned about in the beginning of the course. Let's say you wanted to redefine the paragraph tag to produce red font in bold with a size 16 pixel font. This way every paragraph you type would appear in that style.
10x. Click the icon on the CSS styles window to create a new style. Select p from the different Tag choices and click on the Tag button. Make the changes suggested in step 6. What happens to your document?
Do the following, and explain in your page (still style.htm) how you did it.
1. Make your paragraph text red, and heading1 purple.
2. Make your links NOT underlined (hint: links use the "a" tag).
3. Change five other html tags. Let me know what other tags you are changing by typing that information within your style.htm document. Try some other cool things, and be prepared to share them with the class. As usual have a link on your home page to this new assignment.
To Do More:
Create a new page called Advancedcss.htm - Explore the Advanced Selector styles to control link colors when the user clicks on the link, hovers over the link, the link appears normally, the way the link looks after the user has already visited it.
To Do Much More: Create an External Style Sheet called external.css and apply it to either a new page or one of the pages you have already created this year