Why convert your website to CSS?

Mar
15

What is CSS?
CSS means Cascading Style Sheets

CSS – is a language which gives web designers more control over the design of a webpage. It allows content and design to be kept separate, allowing small changes to the design to be made without having to make large changes to every page.

Most web designers are avid users of html and the majority of websites
are constructed in this standard universal language and the result looks
fine, so why change it?

You can improve your website’s performance with CSS:

  • Faster download times;
  • Reduced band with consumption;
  • Simplify the creation of new pages;
  • Reduce the time to make overall design changes, like font or colours;
  • Increased control over styling.

Faster Download times

We all appreciate that the faster
your website appears, the happier your visitor is and the more likely they
are to stay. Despite the introduction of ADSL and Broadband internet connection,
most people still use good old-fashioned modems. Your website will load up
quickly on high speed connections but dreadfully slowly on modems.

Research has proved that pages that take too long to load will result in
lost visitors. CSS can decrease download times in a number of ways:

By reducing the amount of markup required to format your web
pages;
Moving the styling commands into a separate file, which is accessed
by all the web pages, so this only has to load once and not for every page.

Reduced bandwidth consumption

Once you reduce your download
times, you also reduce your bandwidth consumption. This is important for
large sites, as you may be paying more to your hosting company for increased
bandwidth, which can be reduced if you adopt CSS.

Simplify the creation of new pages

When you need to add new pages to your site it will be much quicker
and easier with CSS, as you can reference the style from
an existing style sheet, rather than having to create all the
formatting tasks all over again and again.

Reduce the time to make overall design changes

With CSS all your main commands for colours, fonts, sizes, layout
and other elements will be specified in your central CSS file. You can make
changes to your entire site by amending one command, without having to alter
every page individually. Again, this is vitally time saving and cost saving
if you have a big site with many pages. CSS also permits you to edit single
files. If you want to change the size, colour and font of all the <h2> headers
on a page, you can do this with one single command with CSS, rather than
editing or adding to the HTML tags on every single page.

Increased control over styling

Without CSS your pages can only have one colour for visited links,
one colour for links hovered over, and one for links that are clicked on.
With CSS you can set these colours separately for different parts of your
page. This is useful for parts of your pages with differing colour backgrounds.
CSS also enables you to set different background colours for links.

Converting your website to CSS is a worthwhile investment to save both time and money in the future, and is certainly worth considering for new sites or sites with many pages.

Posted by admin on Saturday, March 15th, 2008