Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) - Why Develop Sites With CSS
The Internet is continually changing, and your website needs to change with it. Now that the browser wars are behind us web designers are able to make good use of Cascading Style Sheets
. CSS has several benefits: separation of content from presentation, faster page loads, even increased search engine visibility come with the package. CSS also offers greater design flexibility and the ablility to make pages accessable under many different circumstances.
As the adoption of CSS-based layouts steadily rises, it's become increasingly important for web designers to learn how to utilize CSS and learn how to use it well. Sites were once designed with tables and those tables were hacked into doing things that they were never meant to do. Unfortunetly many designer still use these out-dated techniques and people are paying them hundreds if not thousands of dollors to do it. It's time for designers and developers to step up to Web Standards and take responcibility for the quality of their work. (I for one am fully commited to making this change)
Today you will find that cutting edge designers and developers using CSS extensively to create beautiful, interactive and fully standards compliant sites. CSS-based layouts make way for the development of sites that will degrade effectively so they will be viewable on all types of devices such as PDA's, cell phones, televisions and devices yet to be invented.
The concept of creating sites that work in all browsers/devices, and then adding advanced CSS styling or functionality for more modern browsers, is known as progressive enhancement. Conversely, ensuring that a page's style or functionality doesn't cause adverse effects in older browsers is known as graceful degradation. These are two very important concepts in standards-based design.
CSS designed pages has its search engine optimization benefits too. When a search engine spiders table-based pages, they retrieve a large amount of content that has nothing to do with the actual content. When a search engines spider encounters a Web standard CSS-based site, the majority of content retrieved will be relavant content, content it can use to increase your sites traffic.
I hope I was able to arm you with enough information to at least investigate transitioning your current table-based layout to a fully valid CSS Web standards complient site or ensuring your new site will be built with higher standards.
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