I am by nature a web developer, not a web designer. So when I have been asked to design websites they honestly look like a 9 year old created something using frontpage. I recently decided that learning how to design websites would be a good idea because I can work on the performance of my web apps while designing them instead to trying to communicate this point through whichever random person gets contracted to do the actual design of the web application.

Over the next while I will focus on CSS in my blog posts and I thought it relevant to write to first post about the benefits of CSS design.

CSS (Cascading Stylesheets) works as a method to present content on a website, which content should be shown where and how. Up until now I have always just used HTML Tables to design the pages I have worked on. This becomes quite tricky after a while especially if you are working with a complex page. I am not saying that tables are never to be used but using tables to set the layout of your page is incorrect. I will go into more details concerning this in a later post.

Benefits of CSS:

1) Your website will download faster to client machines:
  A) When using tables, the browser reads your content twice. Once to layout the tables and a second time to fill the content of the tables.
  B) Generally, using CSS design instead of Table based design requires less code
  C) CSS styles can be stored in a separate document so that it can be cached.
  D) With CSS you can set the download order of content on your page, so text will download first and then the larger images can be downloaded

2) Your webpage will be more Search Engine Friendly as CSS content driven spiders can detect more content on better structured HTML code

3) Making your website more accessible becomes easier. If for example you need your website to be viewed on a mobile device, simply create a Stylesheet that caters to a mobile device. This way you only need to swap stylesheets instead of recreating whole web apps.

There are a quick few reasons as to why you should start looking at CSS driven design if you do not already use CSS.