Georgiana - Georgiana Tech Blog

Make your website standards compliant

Friday, 30. January 2009, 12:20:40

web standards; web design; search engines

Creating a web-standards compliant site makes the maintenance easier, which in turn allows you to introduce changes to your website quickly and smoothly. Due to the fact that all styles are stored in external Style Sheets you can change an entire color scheme of your pages by changing only a small number of basic values. Additionally, because no HTML styling information is present, the code itself is more clear and easy to read. The amount of code is also considerably lower in volume, which makes any future changes easier than ever. Lower file sizes of your website will allow you to enhance page loading time (customers with slower connection will have a better experience), lower bandwidth consumption (this helps to reduce hosting costs of your business).
Another advantage of a standards based website is that it will also become more accessible to various search engines. Inaccessible website with bad structure is the major cause of text misinterpretation by search engines. Consequently, it is quite possible that you will be losing money out in search engine listings.

Why sholud you use CSS?

Friday, 30. January 2009, 12:08:16

css; web design; web standards

Although CSS has become a very powerful and common tool in web design, many inexperienced designers still fail to use it properly. I'd like to give you the most basic reasons for adopting CSS on your site:

CSS allows you to save your time: Those familiar with HTML know that that it requires from user to set the font face, size, color, style and various attributes for each of their occurances on a particular page. As a consequence, you spend most of your time typing, copying and pasting the same line of code over and over again. CSS enables you to define such details only once for any element (for instance you are able to set all h2 text on your website to be size 12, blue, Courier). The styles you have set are automatically used whenever a described element occurs.
Faster page loading time: You don't have to repeat the same code many times on your site, so there is generally less code present with CSS than with HTML only. This allows for reduced page download times.
Easier maintenance: Every time one wants to alter the style of a particular element, they can easily look it up in the style sheet and it doesn't have to be edited more than once.
Superior styles to HTML: CSS gives you access to a much wider array of attributes than just HTML.

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