Before you start changing the look and feel of BELTS, you will need to be familiar with a number of technologies and products.

CSS is used to manage all of the style elements in BELTS. A solid understanding of the box model (used to determine element position) is particularly important. Although some CSS level 2 constructs have been used, the majority of BELTS uses level 1 to help with Internet Explorer™ compatibility.

You'll need a working knowledge of XSLT if you want to change the structure of pages.

All the pages generated by BELTS conform to the XHTML specification and there are a number of subtle differences from HTML 4.0.1 with which you need to be familiarise yourself.

You may also want to learn how to read a Cocoon site map. These control what steps are taken to generate a page. Being able to read these files will help you when you want to know which XSLT to change for a specific screen.