CSS Website Design

Cascading Style Sheets is a declarative language that is used to enhance the HTML language. CSS is user friendly and purposely designed to be very readable and writable. A minimum amount of coding can create sophisticated web pages that have a common theme in appearance and also improve the performance of website.

What is CSS Web Design?

Efficient, Flexible Web Page Design CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) offer a way of keeping content and design elements separate. Because this separation allows us to include more meaningful content on each page, Web sites designed with CSS utilizing Web Standards often provide their owners with more benefits than older table-based Web sites.

Why Use CSS?

Briefly, there are three main advantages for any business that embraces CSS:

Ease of Maintenance - A web site designed with CSS allows design elements for an entire Web site to be changed in a single file. When you want to change the type size for a heading or for paragraphs throughout the site, your designer will be done in minutes or even seconds rather than in hours. The larger the web site, the greater the benefits of switching to CSS will become.

More Search Engine Visibility - By reducing unnecessary tags, such as table tags, the actual Web page content may become more readily apparent to search engines.

Accessibility - Though switching to CSS does not necessarily result in more accessible pages, at the very least it allows a skilled designer to remove unnecessary clutter and leave clues for those who use assistive technology to view your pages.

Faster download speed

A faster download speed will make you money? Well, yes. Slow download speed is often cited as one of the biggest usability complaints for websites. A faster download speed therefore leads to increased usability, and a web usability redesign can increase the sales/conversion rate by 100% (source: Jakob Nielsen8).

CSS downloads faster than tables because:

• Browsers read through tables twice before displaying their contents, once to work out their structure and once to determine their content
• Tables appear on the screen all in one go - no part of the table will appear until the entire table is downloaded and rendered
• Tables encourage the use of spacer images to aid with positioning
• CSS generally requires less code than cumbersome tables
• All code to do with the layout can be placed in an external CSS document, which will be called up just once and then cached (stored) on the user's computer; table layout, stored in each HTML document, must be loaded up each time a new page downloads
• With CSS you can control the order items download on to the screen - make the content appear before slow-loading images and your site users will definitely appreciate it.

Reduced bandwidth costs

Web pages using CSS for layout tend to have much smaller file sizes than those using tabular layouts. It's not unusual to see reductions of 50% or more in file size when switching from tables to CSS. Smaller file sizes obviously mean reduced bandwidth costs, which for high traffic sites can mean enormous savings.

The main reason for this dramatic decrease in file size is that presentation information is placed in the external CSS document, called up once when the homepage loads up and then cached (stored) on to the user's computer. Table layouts on the other hand, place all presentation information inside each HTML, which is then called up and downloaded for every page on the site.

Additionally, CSS can be used to replace JavaScript image rollovers, again allowing a large reduction in overall page size. See the article, CSS navigation menu6 for more on this.

A higher search engine ranking

A CSS-based website will appear higher in the search engine rankings for three reasons:

• The code is cleaner and therefore more accessible to search engines
• Important content can be placed at the top of the HTML document
• There is a greater density of content compared to coding

A higher search engine ranking means more site visitors, which, provided your website is usable, should lead to an increase in enquiries or sales.

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