Web design with Cascading Style Sheets is superior

CSS makes your website easy to update

Want to redesign this page? Go ahead. Click on a new style.

These are relatively simple examples for demo purposes, to show you how easily the colour and fonts and graphics can be changed if your site is designed with external cascading style sheets.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS for short) sound a lot scarier than they really are. CSS is a language for describing how you want the elements of a web page to look.

For example, instead of using <FONT FACE="arial"> all over your site to set text to Arial font, you can just create a CSS file that instructs Web browsers that all body text should be displayed in an Arial font. Making changes to the look of your site becomes much easier since you can make a change in one place and have it affect your whole site at once. That is the basic idea behind an external css.

With External Cascading Style Sheets you can easily change color codes, fonts styles and sizes, and other page properties in ONE file and the style sheet changes it on every page that is linked to the style sheet (usually, your entire site).

If you have a site created only in HTML, you will regret it the first time you want to update the look of the site. And you will want to update your site - just like you update your home decor, your car, your clothes, or your shoes!

Different browsers support CSS to differing extents. However, there is enough support available already to save yourself a lot of time typing <font> tags, and you will find that CSS saves you more time when you need to re-design your web site. If you don't like the new look, you can easily change it back within seconds.

You get higher search engine rankings with CSS websites

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

The code is cleaner and easier for search engines to read and index.
Important content can be placed closer to the top of the HTML document, because less space is wasted in coding
There is a greater density of content and keywords, compared to coding, so your site scores higher in keyword density

A CSS website will save you money!

Reduced bandwidth costs

Web pages made with CSS have much smaller file sizes. Smaller file sizes mean reduced bandwidth costs. If you have a site that has a lot of traffic, this will save you money is webhosting fees.

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.

Your visitors are less likely to leave your site because your site will appear on their screen faster

Since there is less repetitive code in your web page documents, they will show on your visitors screen faster, and less visitors will leave from frustration waiting on the website to appear. This can increase sales.

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 and those add 'weight' to the page, making them appear more slowly
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 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

CSS (cascading style sheets) is the professional webmasters' choice for the development of quality websites.

Experienced webmasters thoroughly know and understand the concept of External CSS. They would never create a web template for a consumer or client without using External CSS as the backbone.

CSS is Compatible with the latest technologies

A CSS-based website is compatible with PDAs, mobile phones, in-car browsers and WebTV.

You can make an additional CSS document specifically for handheld devices, which will be called up in place of the regular CSS document, thereby ensuring your website is accessible to this lucrative market. This isn't possible with a tabular layout.

Conclusion: Start out with a CSS designed website!

Switching your website from a table layout to a CSS layout can be a long, arduous process, especially for large websites. When we first started designing websites, we didn't use CSS. Then, when we switched our flagship web design site from tabular/HTML to css-based after it had gotten to over 100 pages -- and it took about 15 hours of work to do it. So, if you're just starting out -- make certain you go with a css-based website from the beginning.

All of our HTML websites include external style sheets so your site is designed correctly the FIRST time. External CSS makes maintenance to your site fast and easy, your pages load faster, and are indexed quicker by the search engines.

Say good-bye to poorly designed websites and say hello to QUALITY and EFFECTIVE designs. You'll be glad you did!

Why don't more webmasters use CSS if it is superior?

Because they often learn HTML and they are taught (or just believe) that is all they need to do websites.

Or they are actually "Graphic Designers" who make beautiful graphics, but know very little about effective websites. They make lovely work - and I couldn't do my job without graphic designers to create client logos, etc. - but their website coding is often ineffective for serious website owners who want to accomplish their online goals. Don't be fooled into thinking that their pretty designs means they are designed effectively for the web.

Pretty web designs are not necessarily designed well.. Don't let a lot of 'pretty' fool you. Look at the source code in the webmaster's site. If it contains a lot of <font> tags, color codes (like #000000, #3df671, etc.), they are likely not going to design YOUR website well either.

The art of effective web design is NOT graphic design. A properly designed web template should not contain a lot of graphics. They're pretty, but they make your website slow to viewers, and sometimes make them less-well-ranked by search engines.

But if I use a template, won't my site look everyone elses?

No. Each template is customized with YOUR logo, your content, your product photos, etc. The layout might be similar, but then the LAYOUT of all major newspapers is generally the same, but each has its own unique appearance.

Our templates are easy to work with and we often change them change them graphically so they do look different than other sites based on the same template.

The chances of all of your visitors finding your site and the site that looks similar to your's in all those millions of websites are minimal. In reality, would your visitors really think poorly of your company if they even noticed the similarities? Not likely. Would it cause you to lose business? Not if you have the product, price, and service they are looking for.

The majority of people who surf the net do so looking for information. As long as your site is easy to navigate and they can find the information they need quickly, they are not concerned at all about whether your site layout is exclusive (or expensive!).