| Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) allows you to create | | | | less time. |
| fastloading pages, increase your search engine | | | | 4. Improve search engine rankings - search |
| rankings, andmodify your whole site with one style | | | | enginesgenerally spider the code at the top of your |
| sheet. So why don'tmore people use them? This is | | | | web page first. |
| because they got so used tohtml design and are | | | | For most sites that means the navigation bar will be |
| afraid or too lazy to upgrade theirskills. Some will also | | | | spideredfirst (resides at top of page code). CSS |
| use ready made templates thatcontain flashy | | | | enables you toposition the code for your content at |
| graphics, bloated code and sometimeseven contains | | | | the top making yourpage search engine friendly. |
| hidden code embedded in the page. | | | | Properly marked up HTML pagescan easily found and |
| In this series of articles I will show you how to | | | | properly categorized by search engines |
| create asimple web site using CSS, so you will have | | | | 5. Fast loading - CSS reduces the amount of tags |
| no excuse tobegin incorporating them into your | | | | usedtherefore producing clean code. Tableless design |
| future designs. | | | | can reduceyour load time by 25% to 50%. |
| What are Cascading Style Sheets? | | | | 6. Reduce bandwidth - compacting the amount of |
| Cascading Style Sheets is the name of a simple | | | | code usedwill reduce the amount of bandwidth |
| languagethat allows you to add any style (font, | | | | needed to host your webpages. Therefore you |
| colors, graphics,links, layouts) to your web pages. | | | | won't have to pay higher fees whenadding more |
| Benefits of Cascading Style Sheets | | | | web documents to your site. |
| 1. Separate content from presentation - you can | | | | 7. Accessibility - increasing accessibility with CSS |
| separateyour HTML markup, text, graphics and | | | | meansbeing able to serve web content to a larger |
| multimedia frompresentation. | | | | audience,increasing web site usability, even for |
| 2. Consistent site wide look and feel consistency - | | | | non-disabledpeople. Content can easily be formatted |
| you canapply one style for 100s of web pages all at | | | | for projection aswell as screen display. Tableless |
| once. So ifyou had to change the color of all pages | | | | layouts display well onhand-helds. |
| on your site, youonly have to edit one style sheet. | | | | 8. Improve the printing of web pages - most printers |
| This saves you a hugeamount of time, especially if | | | | willonly allow you to print a portion of the web page. |
| you had to edit each pageseparately. | | | | With CSSyour whole document can be printed. |
| 3. Web site maintenance - apart from being able to | | | | When you use CSS it becomes quick and easy to |
| makesite wide changes easily through one CSS file, | | | | apply newstyles that can not only effect all styles on |
| the cleancode it generates makes it easier to update. | | | | your web pagebut even your whole site. |
| Properlymarked up web pages permit them to be | | | | In the next article I will explain how to layout a web |
| maintained by morethan one person. It will also work | | | | pageusing CSS. |
| in more browsers. Website redesigns will take much | | | | |