CSS Web Design

In the current scenario, the websites are swiftly populating the web. The design of a website plays a crucial role in its popularity. Properly designed website with good design tactics definitely leads against its competitors.

There exist some simple and highly effective websites that use cascading style sheets (CSS). This functionality is implemented in the websites to improve the web design and to make the website perform better in major search engines. It also helps in grabbing quality traffic for the websites.

Before going further with CSS Web Design, it is important to understand the meaning and application of CSS.

What is CSS and how it is used?

CSS stands for ‘Cascading Style Sheets’ a new functionality widely used for layout and style of web pages. With the help of CSS the presentation and styling code is separated from the actual content in web design. CSS implementation consists of few rules which are stored in separate files with a .css file extension. Then CSS file is linked from the web page using HTML link tag.

In the past decade, tables were the only tool available with the web developers to design the layout of web pages of any website. But with CSS support, web developers now have a choice. There are lots of advantages in terms of web design to separate the presentation code into distinct CSS files.

Here are some excellent web design modes through which the web site design could be made more search engine friendly. These are as follows:

Use CSS to Structure the Document

Content is very important part of any website. Search engine robots read the content of the website and indexed it. By removing the extraneous table tags and replacing them with smaller HTML (div) tags formatted with CSS rules makes it much easier for the robots to read and index the content. This makes the code search engine friendly.

Use CSS to Style the Header Tags

Search engines give importance to header tags. As header tags are used to define page structure and simplify page navigation. Using CSS here makes the header tags appear in nicely formatted and attractive text. This increases visibility of the website in the search engines.

Use CSS to Create Rollover Images

Traditionally, web developers create rollover images using 2D graphics with some complex JavaScript code. This JavaScript code can adversely affect the search rankings of the website. Instead of this creating a normal text link and using CSS to format its appearance is a much better way to create images.

There are number of benefits of CSS over the classic web design techniques.

Benefits of CSS Web Design:

1. Separation of Content from presentation: HTML mark-up, text, graphics and multimedia can be separated from presentation.
2. Consistency: CSS provides a way to apply single style to various pages at a time. For example: to change the background color of all the pages of the site just make a change in CSS and it will be reflected in the entire website.
3. Maintenance: CSS makes the code clean & clear, and more understandable which can be easily edited and maintained.
4. Search engine rankings: With the help of CSS, one can position the content at the top in the page code to make it SE friendly.
5. Fast loading: Table-less design diminish the load time by 25 to 50 percent.