What are the benefits of using the style sheet in a large company or educational institution?
I “grew up” teaching HTML to myself, and coding HTML pages manually. I didn’t know much of structure and presentation layer, and I happily mixed HTML and presentation elements together to create a big messy code stew. I remember when I first saw the CSS function in Dreamweaver and I thought that it was stupid - why would I define the look of a page element somewhere else instead of right with the very element? Well, I learned why when I decided to change the look of my website and I had to change every single element of presentation manually. CSS at first glance was terribly confusing and I didn’t feel I really _need_ it. Over the years I thought it would be nice to know CSS and I especially liked the possibilities of positioning elements with precision. Having to use tables to arrange items on a webpage always seemed awkward to me. But it would also mean having to forget everything I knew about HTML and start over. When I started at Davenport, the first class I took was CISP110 (Web Page Development) and when I looked at the book I was happy as a clam that I would finally learn CSS. Now, enough of the babble, why don’t I just answer the question?
A CSS (or Cascading Style Sheet) is a file that holds the presentational layer of a web page and thereby separates formatting from content. In a large company - and an educational institution is usually just that - it is extremely important to use CSS. It helps to keep a unified corporate image across all parts of the web page.
Often, different people work on different parts of the web site, someone may be in charge of the customer service pages while someone else takes care of the product index - the equivalent in an educational institution would be the different departments for example the Computer Science department vs. Marketing Department etc. Instead of formatting web pages manually, the formatting would be set by a CSS while the code only defined elements or regions. If you think of a web site and its different sections, they all have a similar feel to it. Most have the same page head and page footer, similar side bars and the overall fonts and color schemes are the same throughout.
Now, consider that a company changes their corporate color scheme. While I am usually a strong believer in the power of color, there are several reasons to change your corporate color scheme. One of them, I experienced with the company I work for. We used to have orange and light grey as our corporate colors, so our links were orange, backgrounds and headers were grey etc. Some years ago, we bought another company and we decided to show off the merger in combining our two business colors. Their color was dark blue, so we decided to change our corporate color from orange and grey to orange and blue. If our web site had not separated content from presentation, someone would have to go through every single page and change the color value from color=”grey” to color=”blue” - and that on thousands of pages on fonts, backgrounds, borders etc. Using a style sheet, the whole thing would take minutes and only a single file would need to be edited in a few places. Not only is this an incredible time saver, it is also a lot less likely to cause errors and ommissions. Now, of course it isn’t THAT easy, but I think it drives home the point well. Of course, we decided a little later that orange and blue really didn’t look that great and we went back to orange and grey 
There are a lot of great examples on the web to display the power of stylesheets, the most famous is probably the Zen Garden (http://www.csszengarden.com/) which can have a totally new look just by switching to a different CSS file.
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