STYLE SHEETS

Building a Dynamic Banner with CSS Sprites

CSS sprites are a powerful technique that can be used to incorporate rollover buttons, dynamic banners, and similar elements to any web page. Sprites can also improve the overall performance of a given web site, since they minimize the number of HTTP requests made by the browser. If you’re interested in learning how to make this approach work for you, then you should start reading this article right now!

Author Info:

By: Alejandro Gervasio

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February 19, 2007

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>Sample Banner using CSS Sprites</title>
<style type="text/css">
    body{
       padding: 0;
       margin: 0;
       background: #fff;
    }

    h1{
       font: bold 24px Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
       color: #000;
       text-align: center;
    }

    #bannercontainer{
       width: 400px;
       height: 100px;
       padding: 0;
       margin-left: auto;
       margin-right: auto;
       background: #eee;
       border: 1px solid #000;
    }

    #bannercontainer a{
       display: block;
       width: 400px;
       height: 100px;
       padding: 0;
            background:#eee url(banners.jpg) 0 0 no-repeat;
    }

    #bannercontainer a:link,a:visited{
       background:#eee url(banners.jpg) 0 0 no-repeat;
    }

    #bannercontainer a:hover{
       background:#eee url(banners.jpg) -400px 0 no-repeat;
    }
</style>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>Sample Banner using CSS Sprites</h1>
    <div id="bannercontainer"><a href="http://www.php.net" title="Download PHP now!"></a></div>
</body>
</html>

If you don't feel inclined to copy and paste the code of the above example, you can download this ZIP file containing all the supporting material, including the background image that you saw previously. I hope you have a good time testing this CSS sprite-based banner!

Final thoughts

Over the course of this second article of the series, I demonstrated how to create a simple yet effective banner which uses the concept of CSS sprites to work properly, without any noticeable lags between its different stages. As you saw, the logic applied here is identical to that used to build the rollover buttons covered in the first part.

However, this journey hasn't finished yet. In the last tutorial I'm going to teach you how to build a basic image gallery that takes advantage of the functionality provided by CSS sprites to display thumbnails and large pictures as well. See you there!

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