Cascading Stylesheets Advantages: 5 Reasons To Use CSS

Cascading Stylesheets Advantages: 5 Reasons To Use CSS

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593

Summary:

Cascading Stylesheets become more and more important in today’s webdesign. But before you decide to get started using CSS you should know why CSS is so important and what its advantages are.

Keywords:

CSS, Cascading Stylesheets, Stylesheets, Create CSS layout, CSS help, style sheet, style sheets

Article Body:

1. The content is separated from the design

Because you are able to create a separate Stylesheet and link it to all your webdocuments, you have great control over how your website looks. So if you want to change a certain aspect of your page, you only need to alter one file: your Stylesheet!

This Of course, generates some great flexibility. This flexibility is not available when your website is using tables for layout, inline font tags or inline defined colors.

A single CSS file can contain positioning, layout, font, colors and style information for an entire web site.

2. You site uses less bandwidth and loads faster

Because stylesheets are so lightweight, your website will load much faster. The main reason is because you do not need table layouts anymore for the positioning of elements. Since text loads really really fast your website will be visible in a flash.

This means that visitors will be happier when surfing your website. They only have to download the Stylesheet once, and it's automatically reused for every page. So the only thing that needs to be loaded is the actual content.

On average a website will load five to ten times faster if it makes use of cascading style sheets.

3. Your website will automatically gain better search engine results

With CSS, you can position any element, anywhere you want. So if your menu is at the bottom of your HTML document, you can bring it up using absolute positioning. The reason this is useful is to make sure the search engine spiders pick up the main content first.

Another advantage you automatically gain is that your HTML code is much cleaner. So the search engine spider will not have to separate the junk code from the real content.

So make sure you put your logo text and your menu at the bottom of your HTML document at put it at the top using CSS!

4. CSS is compatible with newer browsers

Because more and more browsers are used other than Internet Explorer on a Windows machine, you need to be sure that your website is accessible by all major and newer browsers.

By using webstandards, defined by the w3c, you are making sure your content is viewable in the future.

Because there are so many browsers these days, it is impossible to test your website in all these browsers on different configurations. Coding to standards is then the only practical solution.

5. CSS can be used to display the same content on different media.

Because you are able to define different stylesheets for different media you have great flexibility in presenting your content.

The printer for example, is a medium on itself. If someone prints out your website, you will be able to modify the look of it. Add an extra black and white logo, remove the advertisements and change the colors to black and white values. It's all done easily by using cascading stylesheets. And the best thing is, visitors do not even have to know you created a new Stylesheet especially for the printer.

Stylesheets can also be created specifically for PDA's and such. As you will understand, this adds some great flexibility to the presentation of your web document.

Conclusion

Cascading Style Sheets are created to make things easier. It gives you great control of your website and makes your visitors happy when they are surfing your website.

You are prepared for the future and will gain better search engine results automatically. Start using CSS to its full potential today! It will suit you well.

Reasons Why You Should Have a Weblogger Installed on Your Web Site

I don't know about you, but when I built my first web site three years back I don't know anything about the webloggers. One day when I checking the features of my web host control panel (after two months of uploading my first home page) I saw the link For few days I was thrilled to know about this.

 One day I did a search on 'web stats' on Altavista. In the search results I came across very good software that tells a lot more about a site statistics. So I installed a free script on my site.

From till then to now I am using my webloggers to refine my web site links and tracking the ad campaigns etc.

So here are few uses, why you need a weblogger and how to use it:

***1. How many people are coming to your site:

This is an average number of visitors your web site is receiving hourly, daily or monthly. By this you can know how your web site is doing by all means. Are the visitors are targeted or not is not the question at this stage. Everymonth your number of visitors are increasing means you are doing a good job as a webmaster.


***2. From where they are coming(referers):

You can know from where or from which page the visitor is coming though this is not so in all cases. You can know which search engine or which affiliate sending you most of your visitors.


***3. What pages they are visiting most:

With your weblogger you can know which page getting maximum hits from search engines, which page frequently revisited by your visitors etc. If you find one, you can keep your main product link on these web pages. Offer a discount price for your product.


***4. How many pages they are visiting:

This tells you stickiness of your web site. How much time your visitor is going to spent depends on his intention to visit your site. If he comes with a search term 'search engine optimization' and he finds
a link to search engine optimization web site, he is not going to stay long.

If he revisits to check and compare your product his stay will be longer. So have a look on how much time each visitor is staying on average. Take care of few things like no pop ups, keep fast loading images, check links, good navigation. These keep your visitor a little more time.


***5. What keywords they are using in search engines:

Very important in search engine optimization of your web pages. See what keywords mostly used by your visitors and which web page coming up with which keyword. Why this is important means you can check
the web page that coming up with that keyword really contain the product they are looking for. You can also add those search words to your metatags.


***6. Which search engine sending you most traffic:

This is another good indication about your web site performance. Write down all the search engine names and try to further optimize your pages.


***7. You can see errors like '404 file not found' error:

This tells you a bad link or wrong URLs with spelling mistakes etc on your web pages .So that you can correct them. These error links are found as 'page not found' errors in your webloggers with the number '404'.
If people click to your 'order.htm' only to see '404 file not found' error, you are losing a sale.

***8. Tracking your advertising campaigns:

If you start an advertising campaign you can set up a seperate landing page for each of your campaign. You can assume that people coming to that page are coming from that particular ad campaign.


All these are useful in improving your website look, search engine position,refining your keywords and changing the pages that sending your visitors away etc.