Consistency and uniformity in design can be fundamental to retail success. Whether it's the packaging on a supermarket's own-brand produce, or the livery on a courier's vehicles, or the colour scheme of a hotel chain, adhering to the pattern helps create a sense of familiarity and trust between company and customer. The consistent appearance promotes the comforting understanding for the consumer that they know what to expect, that they're entering into a no-risk experience: they've trusted this company before, and they know instinctively through recognising the design that they can trust them again.

The consistency has another, less tangible benefit. It engenders an aesthetically pleasing environment, the better to encourage the consumer to engage with their surroundings - putting the customer or client at ease makes it easier for them to feel that they need and are willing to pay for the business's goods or services. Both of these factors make it critical that your business enjoys a consistent design across its website, for without a tangible presence, a shop floor for the customer to walk around, the visual impression is the one thing that will define your website (and by extension, your business) as appealing and distinctive.

However, if you have a large site with many pages, ensuring that the code is in place to maintain this design throughout can be a large and painstaking operation. Minor details can easily be overlooked in the mass of code, leaving an individual page or section outside of the scheme. What's more, should you decide to update your company's visual appearance, applying the new style uniformly across all pages can be prohibitively time-consuming.

You may be faced with three equally unappealing alternatives: leaving the outdated and tired style in place; taking some or all of your website down for a long period of time while it is updated; or paying a significant sum to IT specialists to make the transition for you.

The answer to this problem is a technology called Cascading Style Sheets, more commonly known as CSS. These style sheets are short documents that contain information on styles, identifying individual elements of a website and how they should be styled in a simple English-language syntax.

Rather than coding the style of each of your webpages individually, each page can include an instruction to look to the style sheet for all of its design information - and as a single style sheet can be accessed by any number of pages, you can ensure that the same design is applied consistently across your website whilst only entering the styling information once. Where a more flexible design approach is needed, multiple style commands can be created - allowing, for instance, a change in colour or font for some pages within a website. In this case, styles can be prioritised, allowing you to decide very simply which pages (or sections of pages) will adhere to the default, and which will have their own style; this hierarchy is the 'cascade' of the title.

Of course, if you've no coding expertise, this may still seem daunting. Fortunately, Microsoft Expression Web makes the process as straightforward as can be. The software provides a range of simple tools, allowing you to define the elements you need and the styles you want applied to them visually - the program will put together the code for you. With Expression Web, you can have complete confidence that your style sheets will work as intended, and indeed that the links to them will also have the desired result.

Getting to grips with CSS can make all the difference to the impact and success of your company's website, as well as saving you a great deal of time in the process - and creating and managing your CSS with Expression Web gives you all the control without any of the hassle. It's certainly worth considering a short training course in using Expression Web, so that you can be sure of giving your business's website the most effective headstart and the brightest future.