Why Websites Need CSS
Written by Michelle Crossley Thursday, 17 December 2009 11:58
Blog - website design and development
It is the design of your website, which determines your presence on the World Wide Web. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) offer obvious benefits over tables, including faster download, higher page rank and a better look for your website. This prized possession of the design world has a number of advantages, a few of which are listed below:
Pages load faster: CSS-based web pages load much quicker because they cache the style sheet information the first time a web page is loaded. You can effectively decrease the 'render time' (the time between page download and when it actually displays on screen) of your pages with CSS. When you switch from table-based layout to a CSS-based layout, the content is stored within the HTML, PHP or ASP file and the visual information is stored within a CSS files.
Better for SEO: CSS removes a considerable amount of HTML from your web pages, thus making the textual content more prominent, so search engines can find your website easily. Smaller file sizes enable the search engine spiders to crawl through your website, quicker. With CSS, the spiders focus attention on your web page’s content rather than redundant Javascript markup.
Easier Navigation: Increased Usability: If a website ranks low on the usability factor, it is bound to fail. Navigation, interaction and browsing should be easy on a website and that is exactly what CSS offers!
Feel free to create beautiful designs: As a website designer,
you don’t need to feel restricted by the tools you use to design your
website anymore. With CSS, you can position elements on top of one another,
just as you use layers in Photoshop. This allows you to create the layout you
have in mind.
CSS used within the HTML on your website determines how each page is laid out.
It also determines what the page elements would look like. Just as the search
engines are evolving with each passing day, websites are evolving and competing
in the World Wide Web by adopting technologies, which help them stay ahead of
the rest of the sites, CSS being the most important technology.
You might be a professional web designer with an extensive portfolio, an amateur web designer or own a small business and looking to grow online. CSS will surely benefit you. In fact, it should be your chosen tool if you want to create a new website or upgrade an existing one. You could even use CleanCSS. It is a powerful CSS optimizer and formatter. It takes your CSS code and makes it cleaner and more concise by merging similar selectors, removing useless properties, white space etc.
Have you used CSS? Do you think it has helped your website? Let us know!
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J. Albert Bowden II makes this comment
Wednesday, 30 December 2009