Samui Design Ezine

CSS or Cascading Style Sheets may sound like web design jargon to you, but in reality it makes a big difference to how efficient and accessible your website may be. So here is a summary, in simple terms, of the benefits of using the new web standards or CSS for your website.

CSS is a computer language that is used to write formatting instructions. These rules tell a web browser how web page content should ‘look’. Up till recently websites were designed with both content and styles in the same file, making the pages bulky and inaccessible to new devices such as mobile phones or blackberries that cannot cope with the graphical demands of those websites. CSS was created to separate the content from the style. Aside from the fact that CSS is now the recommended standard by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), designing websites using CSS has many other advantages, some of which are listed below:

1. Separate content from presentation - Style and content are kept separate, making it easier (and cheaper) to later update the look of the website.
   
2. Higher ranking by search engines – Google and other search engines give more weight to content closer to the top of your HTML document. With CSS you can easily structure the content to appear first, giving your site higher search engine ranking.
   
3. Fast loading pages - CSS-based web pages will speed up the loading of your pages considerably because the styles are all contained in one file that only needs to be loaded once.
   
4. Small file size - CSS will also reduce the file size of your html document. This helps reduce loading time and bandwidth usage.
   
5. Accessibility - CSS provides information to non-sighted users and voice-browser users, making your website more accessible to all (now a legal requirement in the UK).
   
6. Save money - CSS will shorten the project development process and makes it easier and therefore cheaper to update the look and feel of a website.
   
7. Way of the future - The future of the web is for websites to be viewed by as many people as possible on as many devices as possible. This may be enforced in future web standards. Therefore if your web site is still using old-fashioned coding, it may become obsolete or disappear from search engines altogether in the future.
   
8. Print friendly - An alternative stylesheet can be used for the printed version of your website. This document can specify that all images and formatting should disappear and only the page content appear on the printed version.

In Conclusion, have a look at the source code of your web pages (Click View then Source in Internet Explorer and View then Page Source in Firefox). Your website does NOT use the new web standards if the source code contains a lot of tables (code looks like <table, <tr, <th, <td ). If your site is still designed with old-fashioned coding, you may want to consider a re-design.