ok recently I've seen some really cool things people have been doing, and it seems like the kind of thing that CSS would do but I'm not sure. Like some sites have a choice of skins. and some sites have different effects set for bold and italics, how do you do that???

ok i found one example of what i'm talking about..

example (http://pianosong.org/b2/index.php)

For skinning see here: http://www.kiss-my-kitty.com/tutorials/php_skinning.php

For CSS read Lissa's CSS tutorial :)

ok i guess i didnt make it clear enough...on some sites they have it set so if when you are doing an entry in it, and you set a word as bold, that bolded word will end up bold and a different color. do you know what i mean? unless i have skipped over it, i dont think that lissa has that on here.

This is the code I use on my site, just change what you need....change the b to an I if you want to do similar with italics...

b {
font-size: 12px;
color: #f779a5;
font-family: Garamond, tahoma, comic sans ms;
}

ok, so how about those dashed lines effects? do you know of a site i can read about that?

Well, thats why I pointed you to Lissa's CSS page...you just kinda learn CSS then go from there...

Dashed lines...

.name {
width: 181px;
border-style: border-top:#FFFFFF solid 0px; border-bottom:#bbf6fa dashed 1px; border-left:#FFFFFF solid 0px; border-right: 0px #FFFFFF;
}

then where you want the line to appear:

<div class="name">
Something here
</div>