Redesign Your Website With CSS

Branding and Aesthetics with the use of CSS

Consumer behavior experts tell us that, presented with many similar product or service options, and little prior knowledge and experience with these brands or companies, consumers will rely on mental shortcuts to make purchase decisions. The way your website looks compared to your competitors has a large influence on how a visitor perceives your company's professionalism and goodwill. If your website looks modern, crisp and clean, you leave a positive impression on your visitors about your company.

Better Usability with the use of CSS

CSS also reduces the amount of HTML code a website requires. Tables and extra tags for fonts and colors cause pages to load slowly. The longer it takes for your page to load, the more likely a visitor will hit the back button. Even though the majority of people use a broadband connection, many are still using dialup. And others may be using a high speed wireless network which, depending on how many others are sharing the same wireless channel, may experience fast or slow connections.

Accessibility with the use of CSS

Rapid advances in wireless communications have made it easy to surf the 'Net using PDA's and cell phones. Tabular page layouts simply don't display properly on small screens. A business that wants to be accessible to anyone, anywhere now and in the future needs to have a website that can be viewed on mobile devices.

CSS design also greatly improves the user experience for the visually impaired, as they cause fewer problems for screen readers and Braille programs.

Search Engine Benefits with the use of CSS

It has been estimated that up to 80% of all purchases online begin with a search engine. And an entire industry is dedicated to helping businesses rank highly for specific search terms to take advantage of the power of search engines.

Although the relevance of a webpage to a search term is determined by HTML elements like title tags and heading tags, content is still "king" because visitors are looking for content, not code. When you have a high code-to-content ratio, your keyword density (the relative frequency of your targeted keywords on your page) is diluted by HTML instructions for how tables, fonts, styles and colors should be rendered. With CSS, there are no tables, and formatting information is contained in one style sheet. So search engines see more keywords and less code.

Search engines are more and are more likely to index deeper pages of your site and send you more referral traffíc.

Bandwidth with the use of CSS

Cascading Style Sheets can save you monëy and íncrease the number of eyeballs that see your page in other ways. "Bandwidth" refers to how much website traffíc your hostíng company will allow you to have each month. Because every time a user lands on your site, he or she must load your pages in his or her browser. Not only visitors, but search engine spiders consume bandwidth too. The more code your pages have, the more bandwidth you use.

If you exceed your bandwidth usage, your site will be suspended until you buy more bandwidth or reach end of the month. Suppose your site receives a sudden surge of traffíc shortly after a popular magazine features your company. That would be the worst possible time for your website to go offline! CSS makes for a more efficient use of bandwidth, and reduces the chances of such problems.

So Are Tables Taboo?

Absolutely not. There are bona fide reasons to use tables to display certain types of content. The beauty about CSS is that you still can use tables when you need to, but you don't need to use tables for everything which significantly reduces your "code load."

How Do I Know If I'm Already Using CSS?

A quick test to see if your site is using CSS is to load your website in your browser (any page will do). Right clíck anywhere in the window, and a menu box will appear. Clíck "View Page Source." You should see keywords like rel="stylesheet" or type="text/css" near the top of the window that pops up to view your source code.

If you're already using CSS, there may be other ways your business could benefit from a website redesign. Driving traffíc, improving the customer experience, making your website more accessible to users and saving time and monëy on webmaster updates make it well worth the ínvestment. Whether you choose to redesign now or in the future, make sure that your web designer and developer are skilled in CSS.