As an additional test I took the simple demo from twisted web in 60 seconds and checked that out. from twisted.web.server import Site from twisted.web.static import File from twisted.internet import reactor resource = File('/tmp') resource.indexNames = ['adminuser.html'] factory = Site(resource) reactor.listenTCP(8888, factory) reactor.run() The adminuser.html has the same sort of link to get the css and in this case all renders successfully. But here the whole site is set up as static so I can see why that might have worked. For anyone really interested below is the css as well. body { padding-left: 11em; color: black; background-color: #ff0000 } h1 { color: orange; } ul.navbar { list-style-type: none; padding: 0; margin: 0; position: absolute; top: 2em; left: 1em; width: 7em } h1 { font-family: Helvetica, Geneva, Arial, SunSans-Regular, sans-serif } ul.navbar li { background: #ececec; margin: 0.5em 0; padding: 0.3em; border-right: 1em solid black } ul.navbar a { text-decoration: none } a:link { color: maroon } a:visited { color: blue } address { margin-top: 1em; padding-top: 1em; border-top: thin dotted } .layout1 { background-color: f2f2f2; color: red; align: center; width: 50% } .box1 { background-color: #efefef; height: 20% } -- *John Aherne* * * * * * * *www.rocs.co.uk * 020 7223 7567