Style sheet best practices?

[Frozen Rope]

What started out as minor changes to a theme of 100 or so lines of CSS entered through the Advanced CSS has ballooned into 2,000 lines. So much for my minor changes huh? (Yes, I have source code access)

My question is: What are best practices for managing performance and maintenance of larger style sheets?

* My page load time is twice as slow
* Do does Ning mange the new CSS entries? (Do they deposit the styles in a new style sheet?)
* I have mostly redundant style definitions. Should I scrap all of the Ning style references in favor of my 1 large CSS, or selectively seek out and replace theirs?
* Should I consider making my work product a theme, and if so, how?
* Are there any offline template building tools or frameworks to aid managing the CSS. I'm using Dreamweaver, but it's important to start of with their correct styles and source code that's compiled.

It's likely that I'll want to leverage this work product over several Ning sites, and want to organize it well for future editing and expansion. I really would appreciate learning from others and want my extra time investment to pay dividends down the road.

Your thoughts????

Thanks for the help all.

[Frozen Rope]

Any thoughts on this?

[Rob]

No expert here but some quick thoughts:

1. Try compressing the css
2. Yes ning puts a style sheet in the form customN.css so in your case, right now, it's custom104.css but every time you edit save the css in the advanced tab the number is incremented.
3. I don't know the repercussions but will personally be looking to remove the ning css definitions myself. Right now you essentially load all their css definitions and override some / most of them via yours. This may affect the themes though not sure.
4. NA
5. Not sure what your looking for but I've found the firefox developer tool extremely helpful. I essentially save the HTML source to my local computer and then edit using a combination of FF and notepad++.

Good luck.