What is CSS?
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and are used to describe the way a website looks. The benefit of having a CSS based website is that it separates design (the way your website looks), from content (text, images, etc.).
What are the benefits of having a CSS based website?
Editing
The main benefit of having a CSS based website is that all of your presentational information is centralized. By centralizing presentational information you make it easier to change the way elements such as headings, fonts, colour’s, etc. look across the whole website making large changes quite a simple task. Making it a simple task reduces the amount of time it takes to make the change reducing the cost to you as we all know “time is money”.
Web Standards
If your just looking for someone to create your website for you and you think that web standards don’t matter to you, you are wrong! The web standards movement over the past years has become a very important one to developer and consumer alike. To the developer we conform to the standards to give us a standard way of working to reduce time taken to develop and reduce time taken to edit, change or add extra functionality to the site. To the consumer a developer that conforms to web standards has your best interests at hart. Because they use a standard way of constructing the different aspects of you website they are ensuring that your site works and will continue to work for years to come, reducing the risk of needing a new site every two years as web browser updates and upgrades potentially devastate your website.
Accessibility
Accessibility is the art of allowing as many people as possible use your website. Using CSS based websites and centralizing presentational information allows us to keep the mark-up in the content part of your site clean, light and able to display in a number of different formats. Using CSS with a back end server technology or a bit of JavaScript will allow you to change font colour or size to help the visually impaired, and because the mark-up of the content file is a lot cleaner this ensures that your site will make sense to people using screen readers. By separating design from content in this instance allows again for accessibility to be less time consuming, more cost effective and broadening you audience.
Visual Effects
Using CSS for presentation allows for more complex and more pleasing visuals allowing the designer/developer a little more freedom as they have a lot of tools at their disposal. When you add a little JavaScript and possible one of the many excellent JavaScript frameworks that have emerged over the last few years such as Prototype, jQuery and MooTools, you can create visually stunning, functional and user friendly features.
Page load times
One of the common problems with the common user (like me) is we are very, very lazy. We won’t wait too long for the page to load and if we do we will just go to the next search result. Using CSS reduces file sizes across the site and allows for effective caching reducing download time’s. Because the CSS file only needs to downloaded once and the presentational information has been removed from your content, files across your entire site will be reduced in size allowing for faster document downloads. CSS also allows the caching of images so if you use a logo and a number of other images in your site, these will be downloaded only once also speeding the page load time.
SEO (Search engine optimization)
Even though CSS dose not directly make your site more SEO friendly, by reducing the amount of data a search engine has to read before it gets to your content will add plus points to the documents score in more than one search engine.
Conclusion
So there are a number of benefits of converting to the CSS side of the fence, but the most important one is that it reduces costs to you as a consumer by reducing cost and at the same time expanding your audience. For any more information on this topic plase contact us.
Categories: Articles, CSS, News, Technical
Maja Williams has written 16 articles.
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