Queen Bee Marketing’s Blog About Marketing, SEO, and Design.

Once upon a time in web land, there was much chaos. Web designers were being terrorized by a vicious enemy known as the table based design. These designs were full of complicated illogical code, took hours to make, and even longer to change. Large web sites (such as Amazon and the like) would have been a huge challenge because the styling code would have to be copied and maintained on every page individually. Not to mention all that messy table code made it more difficult for the search engine spiders to make sense of a web page’s contents.

Then it all changed. The answer to the web designers’ prayers arrived in the form of Cascading Style Sheets or (CSS). Beautiful Beautiful CSS.

What makes CSS so beautiful? It is more than the obvious aesthetic advantages showcased across the web on such sites as www.csszengarden.com. CSS based design has many other notable benefits.
1. Lean, Mean, and Easy to Clean
Probably the most powerful feature of CSS is the ability to pull the styling code outside of the individual pages and organize it all into one separate file that is called a style sheet. This style sheet can then be linked to all the pages that use it (whether it be one page or thousands). Any changes or additions made to the style sheet then “cascade” down to every page in the website which is far easier than making changes on every page individually. This also has the benefit of making the on page code a lot cleaner and lightweight.

2. Google Friendly
Once the code is all squeaky clean and lightweight it can start a long lasting friendship with Google. Since CSS allows the on page code to be organized without styling in mind it tends to become more logical. This makes it much easier for the search engine spiders to read it and make sense of the content. It is said that pages that utilize CSS based layouts (rather than tables) tend to get ranked higher and more quickly on Google.

To find out more on CSS based design simply read any of the endless sources across the web. A good place to start would be http://www.dezwozhere.com/links.html

Some recommended books include my personal favorites Transcending CSS by Andy Clarke and The Zen of CSS Design by Molly E. Holzschlag.