CSS is an acronym for Cascading Style Sheets. CSS allows you to create fast loading pages, boost your search engine rankings, and alter your whole site with one style sheet. Then why don?t more people use them? This is for the reason that they got so used to html design and are afraid or too lazy to improve their skills. Some will also use ready made templates that contain flashy graphics, stuffed code and sometimes even contain hidden code embedded in the page.
CSS has been around for several years and is supported by all the major browsers available today, including Internet Explorer for the PC and Mac, Firefox, Safari and Opera. CSS has opened up tremendous possibilities for improving web site designs, web page layouts and adding new features. The HTML code can be made shorter, cleaner and simpler by CSS resulting in faster loading of web pages, and making them more accessible to search engines.
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 willing to wait more than 5 seconds for web page to load.
Some benefits of using CSS
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.
If you are not using CSS it would be well worth your time learning the CSS tags and their properties. Think of it as a future investment, the time you spend now will pay for itself in better search engine ranking, saved bandwidth and you will cut down on your maintenance and development time for your new sites.
If your site is still mostly using tables for its design, you may want to consider doing a redesign. It may take a lot of work now but if you leave it for too long it will be much more work plus will be missing out on all the benefits of CSS outlined in the points mentioned above.
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