A word from your neighborhood designer: Using CSS…and what the heck that means…
Let me go ahead and sound the geek alert on this post. It’ll be a doozy!
Still reading? If so, I’ll really try to make it worth your while…and give you a better understanding of how your webpages should be built and how it affects your business. And yes, it DOES affect your business.
The building blocks and the big picture
When you see a webpage, you’re seeing a big arrangement of text, photos, videos and the like being controlled by HTML, javascript and other scripting languages that tell a page how to behave and interact. When the page is loaded, you don’t see all the processes that are going on underneath, you just want it to load quickly, interact the way you expect and get you to the content you desire…and when done well, that’s what should happen.
And in the world of the internet, the website that gets found the most (in search engines, etc.), works the best (loads up fast, works in every browser, doesn’t require a bunch of downloads to get to content) and has the most compelling content (you REALLY want to use it) is the site that makes the most money or wields the most influence.
What you might not know is that the sites that are doing well have gone to great lengths to make sure that what’s under the hood works the best it can. One of the ways to accomplish this is through Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Basically, style sheets are a way of keeping all the presentational stuff (font colors, sizes and styles, background colors, object placement, etc.) away from the HTML code (which tells the browser “this is a paragraph,” “this is a link,” “this is a headline,” etc.). You’ll hear a lot of designers call this the separation of content and appearance, and that’s really the best way to put it.
There are three reasons this is a good thing for you:
1. Accessibility
In 2002, Jeffrey Zeldman wrote that 99.9% of websites are obselete and though things have improved on the web, there are still a lot of sites out there that everyone either can’t see at all, or can see but can’t interact with properly.
In short, you want to reach people with your website, and in order to do that, they have to be able to both see and interact with it. It has to work for everyone.
Now, you might be thinking…well, if it works on Windows, then we should be good. And that thinking would fall in line with a lot of web design companies out there. However, it couldn’t be further from the truth.
Not only do you have both Mac and PC browsers, but you also have an ever-increasing number of people using Linux-based browsers. In addition, there is a host of disabled internet users using special browsers that increasingly depend on really good HTML that tells the browser what kind of content it’s looking at. If the code is ridden with stuff about fonts and colors and spacing, these screen readers have a hard time dissecting what is content and what isn’t.
In addition, different browsers have different ways of rendering a page. If you haven’t built your page according to the latest web standards, optimized for cross-browser issues, you might get unexpected results at best…and possibly an unusable website.
2. Flexibility
There is nothing worse than having to spend a lot of time and money paying people (like me) to make simple changes to your website.
When your website is littered with junky code that sprinkles style commands throughout the many pages of the site, changing them can be a frightening proposition. This is where CSS really makes a difference.
When all of your appearance-related controls are in one place, making even broad changes to your site is a snap. Need all the paragraph colors to be dark green instead of dark brown? We can change a simple line of code to make that happen. Need the left column on the right and the right column on the left? Just a few lines of code can make that happen, too.
Stylesheets give you HUGE flexibility and make sure that all of the things that make your site look good stay tucked away in one place…away from your simple HTML.
3. Findability
One of the greatest reasons to use simple HTML or XHTML is how it helps you get found on the internet.
Search engines LOVE the geeky stuff. They really do! Start talking about semantic html, opened and closed tags, alt tags for images and the like, and the search engines just DROOL. They want to find plain ole html…the kind that simple says, “Hey! I’m a headline with some really relevant keywords in here. You really want to check me out.”
Even the largest of sites have figured this out. Yahoo, ESPN, Wired Magazine, The New York Times, USA Today and countless others have gone through a complete redesign into semantic XHTML and CSS.
They’ve reported not only better search results and the like, but a slice in bandwidth, too! ESPN gets over one million hits per day. When they redesigned, they cut their page load in half. Imagine how many kilobytes per hit that saved them…how many terabytes of bandwidth saved over the long haul.
There’s a lot more you could say about it all, but the short end of it is…building better pages makes good money sense.
Real Estate Manager
One of the first tasks I took on as a designer here was to completely retool the presentation side of Real Estate Manager, our proprietary software for real estate publishers, brokers and agents. This software, paired with a well-designed and built front end, will give clients a much better chance of both getting found on the internet, and having a useful site, once visitors arrive.
I really believe in building good and usable webpages…not just because it’s a good thing to do, but because it’s good for you, our clients, too.
