After reading the article, “CSS Floats 101”, I have a better understanding of the process of floating certain elements so that my web page is not simply content stacked on top of one another in a design devoid of any creativity or uniqueness, which was the case before reading Noah Stokes’s piece. Specifically, I struggled with the “clear” property because I did exactly what Stokes says to avoid. I tried to make only a few of my page’s features float so as to create a unique design, but what I ended up with was a mess. The content I minipulated appeared on top of my page’s other content because, as Stokes points out, I disrupted my site’s normal flow. however, I was able to correct my mistake using the “values” element, which re-arranged my content the way I had hoped it to be laid out originally.
The other problem I had in designing my web page using CSS was using the “float” element to layout my content the way I wanted it to be presented. I was unaware that I needed a container to hold my floated content in place, and therefore didn’t add it to my original design. Without a container, my floated content went to the extreme left and right of the page, instead of where I had intended it to go, which was into a two-column design. Luckily, Stokes’s article steered me in the right direction and, using the #container, #content and #navigation tags, I was able to direct my content to its rightful location on the page.
Thanks to Stokes’s direction, I was able to use a very useful tool in web design to make my site as appealing as possible. Without instruction, I would’ve struggled to place my content where I had intended it to go and wouldn’t have known how to prevent my floated content from hiding the other features of my page. With Stokes’s straightforward, step-by-step instruction, I was able to correct my errors and design my page the way I had intended to.