CSS web design – the way forward
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is the latest web design technology with numerous benefits in terms of layout, accessibility and lower costs.
It was invented in 1996 by W3C to unite a fragmenting market with a markup system that was leaner, cleaner and crossed all browsers.
CSS Web Design Benefits:
• Faster download times
• Faster design times
• Quicker amendments
• More accessible
• Search engine friendly
• Print friendly
• Mobile device friendly
• Future-proof
CSS websites are faster to download
With less than 3 seconds to capture your customer's attention, you need your pages to load fast.
CSS design code cuts through extraneous markup clutter, reducing page sizes by an average of 60% compared to table-based layouts.
And once you have opened a CSS page it will reload instantly, as it's stored in the cache. Whereas a browser has to re-read the contents every time it opens table based page.
CSS web design is more versatile and flexible
When a site has been built in CSS and templates, site-wide changes can be made to multiple pages with one little string of code.
Additional sheets can completely restyle the same site if you want to revamp it, make a print friendly version or make it accessible for mobile devices. (Mobile devices are growing exponentially and it is estimated by 2008 58,000,000 PDAs will be sold†.)
CSS web design is better for search engines
With CSS the code structure on the page can be designed to feed the search engines with the most important information first, regardless of where is appears on the page.
By having a leaner page with a better structure means that a CSS based page will achieve higher rankings than table based layout.
CSS web designs are more cost effective
CSS designs give you the best of both worlds. They use less code so they are quicker to write. Also, because site-wide changes can be made to multiple pages with one change to a piece of code changes and amendments can be done faster.
Less programming time = less money.
†source: eTForecast3
