Posted under on May 20th, 2006 by Paul Barnes / No Comments

Having only known building web pages in tables since 1998 and having spent 10 years perfecting the skill, changing over to CSS was always going to be a reluctant chore!

So why bother at all? The web moves on regardless of developer/designer preferences and the argument for CSS has been an ever more convincing one with the majority of developers now fully versed in the basics.

But what does a web site with CSS markup offer that a web site created in tables doesn’t. Well, when I first started using CSS, needless to say it was slow going. More time was spent typing in values than was spent looking at the design so initially it feels like a very detached and unintuitive process. Tabling up a web page design seemed lightning quick compared to CSS but the real benefits come after the initial build.

Ok – so CSS takes a little longer than tabling but the end product adds up to something more than the sum of it’s parts. When we look at the following areas, we can see why…

• Design
• SEO
• Maintenance
• Scalability

Design

When designing for a tabled site, the website designer is all too aware that their lovely design will get the slicing treatment and once sliced, further changes or even slight adjustments start to become painful. A design which is set into an html tabled grid is fairly rigid. Whilst it offers general browser consistency, the designer will always be called back into service if tweaks, adjustments or wholesale changes are needed and new images will need to be generated, often with accompanying table tweaks too. Since CSS offers up the ability to set images free-floating in Div tags, they have a bit more freedom to stretch out into available space. The developer, rather than the designer has the power to push the images or other elements around the screen with increased freedom.

SEO

In a web site which has many pages with common elements, tabled markup often repeats itself unnecessarily. By removing the repetition and instead slotting the common values/variables into the one common style sheet, a lot of erroneous markup is weeded out of all the website pages. This makes things a lot clearer for search engine robots when they visit your pages. The content which really matters – the written content containing all your important keywords, starts to become more prominent. If a robot determines that keyword content is more dense in relation to overall markup page length, then, quite simply, it’s likely that you’re scoring better on SEO points as a result.

Maintenance

As touched upon with the design advantages, maintenance is an inevitable part of any website build and more often than not, the client will be making a swathe of ‘small’ updates between an agreed design and the launch. Fundamental things like text size, text color, accent colours, navigation additions/changes can all be made with simple CSS page updates as apposed to updating each individual html page – a painful and length task even on a small site. The advantages are clear for very large sites.

Scalability

CSS naturally encourages fluid thinking and layout. Fluidity in the sense, that text boxes are designed to expand with increased text so that any update with differing amounts of content will not break the web page layout or, at the very least it will degrade gracefully.

As a long-time advocate of tabled markup, spending the last year working intensely with CSS has been a jump into the deep-end – one which at times appears to go against the grain but the benefits are clear and having the option of both in the toolbox is no bad thing. Tabled markup is still something of a must for mailout webpage content so it’s not quite a dead art just yet!

At mwa Digital we CSS our sites to W3C standards. For more information on how we can help you with an online project, please contact us at www.mwadigital.co.uk