okay hopefully this didn't already exist
because i tried putting a search on the forum search bar thingy and i couldn't find it.

but for external css files,
what portion of my css do i put it there? do i include the <style.css> whatever things in it? and what is the code for putting the .css file to use?

Are you talking about this? http://htmlhelp.com/reference/css/style-html.html

^ I believe so.

You would use that code, (<link rel=stylesheet....)

In an external CSS, you would list and code all the divs, tags, headers and such. Since you are doing it on Notepad or Wordpad, you would save it as blahblah.css

Then, you would upload the blahblah.css onto a host, and you would link that in the <link rel=stylesheet....

Using external CSS is very useful because you don't have to copy and paste for each edit page of all the style codes. Also, there will be less space since all you have to do is just put one line in, the <link rel=stylesheet....

When your editing in Notepad/Wordpad, you don't have to start off <style> and end with </style>

You can just start out with the divs, tags, headers, etc.

Example in a Notepad:

.header {
margin-left: #px;
font: font type;}

.banner {
margin-left: #px;
font: font type;}

Save it, upload it, and add it into the code. (that was just a quickie code)