CSS is nothing new. Web designers have been using CSS to style text on their sites since the 90’s. So when a Web developer tells you they know CSS or has it listed on their resume. Do they really know CSS?
CSS now is used to separate style from content. What do I mean by this? Your CSS stylesheet should be used to specify all design elements within your Website, and your content should be displayed in your XHTML document.
Why not just put it together in a XHTML table-based layout? Many reasons! For starters:
- If you want to change an styled element on your site. Just change in in your CSS stylesheet and it will change in every instance it’s in across your whole entire Website.
- A browser only has to render your stylesheet once to use on every page as opposed to table-based layouts where it has to redownload the style of the page for each page it visits. This means quicker load times and a better text to code ratio. A good text to good ratio is especially good for Google AdSense becaue AdSense bases relevant ads to your topic on your content and when all the content it’s scraping is mainly table structured code then it lowers your relevance. Also, a quicker load times means better search engine rankings because it proves better usability and bots can crawl the code quicker and get right to the content easily without sifting through nested tables. After all CONTENT IS KING!
- Everybody’s doing it! All profressional Web designers knows that tables are out the door. They only should be used for displaying data. So hop on board or get left in the dust.
Unfortunately, Internet Exploder’s browser support has been very weak for CSS, and yes, even with the improvements of IE7. There are CSS hacks to get around all that though. CSS layouts take a bit more time to put together due having to hack them to be cross-browser compatiable, but the benefits are worth it.
Here’s a few CSS layout sites we’ve done:
http://www.parkcitysbestlistings.com
January 22nd, 2007 at 8:10 am
Good post! =)
Even though putting together non table-based CSS layouts tends to be more time consuming it has proven to be more search engine and user friendly.
March 8th, 2007 at 3:57 pm
Wow great blog, I completely agree with you CSS is slowly but surely taking over, at this point table based layouts are becoming quaint and outdated but still for some reason CSS isn’t the across the board norm it should be. But keep up the good work!
August 20th, 2007 at 3:02 pm
Hello! Help solve the problem.
Very often try to enter the site, but says that the password is not correct.
Regrettably use of remembering. Give like to be?
Thank you!