CSS - Maximum benefits 

What is CSS?

CSS is a simple file which controls the visual appearance of a Web page without compromising its structure. Using CSS we can control our font size, font color, link color and many other attributes on our web page. This will make our HTML code much more readable and the page size will be reduced.

Why to use it and how to use it properly

If you don't use CSS on your web pages and you have many tables and content on them, chances are that your HTML file size will be quite big. Fact is that we live in a busy world, and people are not will to wait more than 5 seconds web page to load.

From the other side some web developers implement the CSS on wrong way. They write their CSS in HTML code of the page, like this:

<html> <head> <title>My Page</title> <style> A { font-family: Verdana; font-size:8pt; color:black; text-decoration:none } </style> …..

What is wrong with this technique? Well, imagine that you have site with more than 50 pages. One day, you decide that you want to change font color and colors of the links on your site. You will have to edit ALL the pages on your site, and do to that you will need time, because you place your CSS in your web page.

Better way is to save your visual attributes in separate, external CSS file, and to link that file with your page like this:

<html> <head> title>My Page</title> <link href="myStyle.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"> ….

Using this technique, you can change the look of your site within minutes, regardless of the number of pages, because your visual attributes are saved in ONE external CSS file. Edit that file, and you are done.

Benefits

Which are the benefits of using CSS? List is quite long and I will list here only the most important.

- Your web page will load faster - Web page will become more search engine friendly - You can change you site appearance within minutes - You can write separate CSS file for handheld devices which will be called up instead of the regular CSS file - You can forget about creating printer friendly version of your site using separate CSS file when user chooses to print the web page. Avoiding standard HTML commands like: <font color="#0000ff"><font size=2>Product</font>

will help us to reduce file size, but that is not the only benefit. Using CSS word product in this example will be moved more close on the top of the document. Search engine will pick up more content and less code.

Imagine that you have 3 columns table on your page. When you see the code, you will notice that first come code for your table, and after that it come your content. Positioning your 3 columns using CSS instead of standard inline elements:

<table width="90%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"> <tr> <td width="381" height="150" valign="top" bgcolor="FFEDD4"> My Product </td> <td height="150" valign="top" bgcolor="FFEDD4"> …..

When CSS is used, your code might look like this:

<div id="leftcontent"> My Product </div>

Again your code is much more clear, and your content is moved on the top of your document, making your HTML page search engine friendly, and reducing your file size.

Content is one of the most important factors in Search Engine Optimization, and you will benefit with removing the unnecessary code in your HTML and create search engine friendly web page.

Validate it Browser war is far behind us. Reality is that most of the people today use Internet Explorer, but you should try to be on safe side and ensure that your CSS code is valid. Not all browsers interpret the CSS on same way. You can validate your CSS here: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/


Recent article: CSS Articles
CSS Content? Using tables within the content of your page is a major no-no, the whole intent and purpose of CSS is to control the style of your page elements, this is done using an external stylesheet.

An external Stylesheet? External stylesheets give you the control of your whole website from one single file rather than trying to edit your whole websites CSS using global search and replace or by opening each page individually.

If you are new to this HTML malarkey then welcome, you have just embarked upon a new learning curve that does not take too long to master. Before the invention of CSS everything within a webpage used to be designed using tables.

Indeed there are still a lot of html editors out there that still use tables to format a pages content, one strong word of advice, get rid of that software and start again. Tables are not extinct within webpages but they should only be used for the purpose of presenting data.

Beginning CSS? I am not going to use this article to give you a whole list of tags and how to apply them, that information would be too easily ignored. There are thousands of well rounded websites available on the net today that can walk you through the first stages of CSS, the one I would recommend would be: W3Schools CSS intro this is a perfect place to start learning CSS, in the interests of parity and fairness I will also recommend What can be achieved using CSS .