CSS? Newbie Help Needed!

[Alfie]

Hi,

Can anybody give me an 'idiots guide' to CSS and how it can help website speed and SEO, etc?

Thanking you all.

Alfie

[Steel Dolphin]

I am far from an expert on SEO, but ican tell you froma designers standpoint that using css is the proper way to do things as opposed to using depricated tages such as the FONT tag. Proper use of css in your web pages makes life much simpler for the designer, especially if you are using a global external style sheet...basically you only need to make changes to one file and the whole site is affected globallly -saves you having to edit 10 or twenty pages for one font style change, etc...

Youy will want to avoid using internal styles (styles built into individual pages) as they can often add extraneous code for the bots to spider thru and I am told this is a bad thing.

Here are a few links that may help you:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9707a.html
http://webmonkey.wired.com/webmonkey/reference/stylesheet_guide/
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/

I hope this helps :)

[l3vi]

Steel Dolphin hit the nail on the head.. ;p

CSS helps reduce the amount of code in your page, so the page loads faster and you have more content then code(Most of the time!~LOL)

[Alfie]

Ok, so should EVERY site that is correctly optimized use CSS?

Is there any reason why a site might NOT use CSS?

Thanks again.

[Wit]

There is no reason NOT to use css, but sometimes it's difficult to get the exact effect you want using css. I still find myself clutching at "tables" now and then, to make a page look good (cross-browser) when resized. But tables go very well with css, so even if you have to use old school tricks, it helps your page's structure and design if you complement them with style sheets :)

[DaveBird]

Hi Alfie,

Just a word of warning also... CSS sheets shouldn't be crammed too badly.

Try and keep them under 10k, and certainly not much over 20k in size.

[Pokeey]

Alf-

CSS IS the only way to go. There is no doubt what-so-ever that it can help page dl times. It does so by eliminating tons and tons of redunant useless code.

When ever I do a Website for a client one of the first things that I check is their dl times. 75% of the time I can come close to cutting it in half using css. This usually results in increased views and sales. Most people will not wait around for a site to load these days. There is just too much competition out there.

From an seo stand point it can help a lot in sneaking in keywords in heading tags that don't look like heading tags. Also by not having so much crap on the page it is less likely for a spider to get tripped up. There are a few other things.

Also you have the ability to change the look of your whole site by changing properties in your style seet.

Dave brings up a great point too. Properties can be abreviated to cut down on style sheet size. Example:

[COLOR=Indigo]p {font-face: verdana, courier; font-size:12pt; color: #000000;}[/COLOR]

Could be written as such:

[COLOR=DarkGreen]p {font: 12pt verdana, courier;}[/COLOR]

We condensed and got rid of the color prop because it will default to black. Change it only if you need to.

Yes, css is the only way to go.


Chris