It is happy times for web designers at the moment; the technique is easy and things are constantly evolving making it very interesting. With the help of CSS you will get quick results as well as being able to create beautiful websites that have every possibility of getting positive remarks by its visitors. The basic idea with CSS is very simple; separate the appearance from the content. This way you will get a very flexible website that is easy to adapt to new platforms.

When you are designing websites is it important that you constantly check that they look good on various platforms. Setting up an easy and good environment when creating your design, is truly of the essence. The basics can be:

• Local web server – Mamp (Apache, MySql and PHP5) is easy and good for Mac if you never have staged a server before. The name for Windows is Wampserver. IIS is a good alternative if you wish to run a Dotnet environment. Most web servers today are very easy to stage – Mamp is for example installed and up and running in just a few clicks.
• Both Mac and PC environment –It is extremely important to check your design in both a Mac and PC web-browser. If you do not have two separate computers you can, via Parallels Desktop, install Windows XP or Vista on your Mac.
• A set of web-browsers; Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Opera – all of these will get you far. A tip is to check out Browsershots.org that renders your design in a diverse set of browsers and platforms. If you want to run Google Chrome on your Mac you will have to wait or install Crossover Chromium, which is a translated version of Chrome for Mac OSX. Remember though that it is only in a test version and you should not entirely rely on its stability.