Since 1994, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) have slowly been becoming the predominant method for styling all types of website pages. It is now acclaimed as the best method for controlling typography and layout throughout a website. Although CSS seems to be the most efficient, user-friendly, web page editing option available today, many people still resist its use failing to understand the benefits from using CSS language.
There are a number of good reasons you as a designer should use CSS including:
- CSS was built by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to replace the cumbersome use of inline HTML tables, frames, tags and other mechanisms that led to some confusion and a lot of excess coding.
- CSS produces faster download times because page files are 50 percent less the size than a traditionally built HTML page.
- Shorter editing time is involved when one CSS file can control the look of hundreds of web pages.
- Here’s one of the absolutely best reasons to use CSS – controlling typography. No need ever again to use a font tag which actually was very cumbersome. With CSS, designers have complete control of faces, sizes, weight, leading, line height, colors and much more making for exciting and endlessly variable use of type.
- CSS is easy to use – just as easy as HTML coding. It allows for an intuitive approach to creating edited elements plus.
- CSS improves a website’s accessibility. There is no need to create separate HTML coded tags for different effects. Therefore, all <p> tags simply indicate a paragraph and all the headline tags will denote the specific headline called for in each instance. This helps to cut down on the need for separate browser coding.
- CSS works in cross-platforms as well as used not only for web browsers but in other media like a Power Point presentation.
- Placement – actual alignment on a page – is in better control using CSS.
- Web page design can be kept spate from content using CSS. Image elements that repeat can be held in a file called for in various positions throughout the site through CSS use. This system allows for different contributors to follow a set methodology that is user-friendly.
- CSS helps sites attain better search engine rankings. Once you use HTML for structuring just content in a web page instead of putting in a bunch of tags everywhere, the search engine spiders will crawl your pages effectively and more than likely grant a higher ranking.
Control, control and more control remains the key benefit from CSS use. It provides a greater degree of options controlling the look and the feel of each web page. Plus, organization is at a maximum when using one file to control many. CSS allows for greater speed and adaptability when updating websites especially when changing complete sections like a header or footer. In the past, coding these requires installation on each and every page. CSS allows a designer the ability to replace or move elements by the simple change on one page.