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Archive for March, 2010

Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) is a coding language which is a prized possession in the website designing world. From tweaking to get the smallest detail to making the coding more search engine friendly, the qualities of resorting to CSS for website design and search engine is indeed quite great. Here are some details on CSS-related website design.

Reducing the Refreshing Time
The plus point in including CSS to a website design is that it reducesthe render time for the pages. In short, users would find it easy to browse through the pages of the website having CSS codes. With pages refreshing in no time, both traffic and search engines would feel at ease to browse the site. This increases ranking and popularity.

Updating Websites Faster
Today, with large number of websites following the dynamic content methodology, the content needs to be updated every minute. This updating sequence is much faster for a site having CSS code.

The updating sequence for global elements is also much faster using a CSS code. For instance, you want to change the border of the top band of your website from pink to red, a slight tweaking in the CSS source code would help change the color. Moreover, if you were to change the color in every page, the task would be Herculean and not without a fault using HTML code. The best way to deal with this is through CSS.

With Search Engine Optimization (SEO) having a direct relation to frequent changes in the website design, the idea of resorting to CSS is a wonderful proposition.

Browsing Equally Well in Different Devices
Search engines are in constant look-out for websites which are friendly to different browsers. They see how compatible a website is finally after its designing. Using CSS, you would be able to showcase your website to users with similar effect in a desktop, PDA, mobile phones, or Macintosh PC.

Coding with CSS for SEO
SEO for a website is successful only when CSS codes are used in the body text as well as the source code. If the source code is long with huge amount of JavaScript and other codes, the spiders would not be able to fully assess the website’s actually body text.

Here lies the brilliance of CSS code. The source code is spic-and-span and the short. The entire body text coding is also neat and error-free. The tables, fonts, and colors are neatly done and artistically created as well. You’d get even more enhancements using CSS code rather than settling for HTML traditionally coding.

So, CSS is a wonder-boy for website design and Search engine promotion.

I know I’ve seen stuff with is and ASP.NET, but I’m still pretty unfamiliar with all web service terminology. I’m about to take a class on Visual Basic, and I’m planning to be a web developer. Will it help me?

This works in the way that if a user has visited the page before (based on their IP address), their hit will not be counter. If a visitor is new to the page, a hit will be counter and their IP address stored for future checking.

Interactive Agency WebMetro Receives ADDY Awards for Web Design and Development
SAN DIMAS, Calif.—-Internet marketing firm WebMetro has been honored by the American Advertising Federation ADDY® Awards for website design and development in the eCommerce and B2B categories.

Technology is constantly evolving and advancing and nothing shows this more than the (short) history of the web.  Just a few years ago, the internet was full of websites with blinking, animated icons and background midi music and lots of people thought it was really great.  Advance a few years forward and, although you still see those things from time to time, the web now contains much more sophisticated elements like video clips, rss feeds, detailed flash animations, and more.   

As the “ideas” about what a website is and what it should, or could, do for a company have also evolved, designers have strived to streamline the process of developing websites and to make them more efficient and predictable.  Because different browsers interpret code differently, it hasn’t always been easy to make more complex websites look the same (or even good in some cases) across browsers and systems. What used to work in the early days of the web was no longer working the way web designers wanted or needed it to.

Cascading Style Sheets to the Rescue
Cascading Style Sheets, also known as CSS, were introduced to improve the capabilities of web presentation.  Prior to CSS, almost all of the html attributes that made up the “look and feel” of a web page were contained within the html directly. This made web page code heavy and often quite clunky.  By using Cascading Style Sheets, designers could separate the design elements from the content of a web page and thereby make the pages more efficient, more streamlined, and easier to maintain.

Not all designers jumped on the CSS bandwagon, and even today, many designers still prefer to layout their web pages using html table-based design, the way just about everyone used to do it. Using CSS to layout a webpage is quite different from the “old fashioned” table layout.   However, the advantages to using a CSS layout for a web page heavily outweigh any argument given for using html tables.  

Although I wouldn’t expect clients to know the intricate details of Cascading Style Sheets (and let’s face it, most clients don’t really want to know much if anything about it!), I do think that clients should be aware of the advantages of using CSS layouts and how they can enhance their websites both now and in the future.

Advantages to Using CSS for Web Layout

Web pages will load faster
No one likes waiting for web pages to load and if a page takes too long to load, many users will often simply leave.  Generally speaking, CSS based page layouts require much less html coding than table-based layouts.  This usually results in the pages loading more quickly.  Moreover, an externally linked CSS file, once loaded the first time, does not have to be reloaded and re-read on every page.  When using CSS for layout, browsers can cache (keep in memory) all the formatting and stylizing for your pages instead of having to read and interpret each style tag on every page. This can also result in much faster page loading times.

Visual consistency across pages
One of the strengths of using Cascading Style Sheets in a website layout is that design elements can be defined in a single place (the css file) and will automatically be applied to those elements on the website.  No longer does each individual page have to be updated to reflect the new style.  This makes for much greater consistency throughout the site.  With CSS, you do not have to re-code every element on every page (and check and double check that you didn’t miss some pages!), styling updates are automatic and site-wide.

Accessibility and usability
CSS allows for more interactive style elements, including font size and line heights, which can make web pages more usable for people with disabilities.  Web pages that use CSS layouts are also often more compatible with more browsers.  What’s more, designers can create specific css files specifically for printing, or mobile devices, as well as the standard computer screen, thereby making websites truly multimedia applications.

CSS is better for SEO
Since pages load faster with CSS Layouts, search engines can more easily crawl through the site.  Also, since there is often less coding on the pages and because CSS separates the design elements from the content, it is easier for search engines to determine what a page is about and to index it appropriately.  Finally, search engine spiders rely heavily on structural organization (heading (h1, h2, h3, etc) tags) and CSS allows designers to design those elements as needed and to place them within the page layout in a way that is most beneficial for search engine optimization.

Future redesigns will be more efficient (read, less expensive!)
Since CSS layouts separate design elements from content, once a site has been designed using Cascading Style Sheets, making changes to the design is often easier because fewer files need to be updated (often only the css files rather than every page on the website!)  This makes for faster and less expensive design changes in the future.  Set your site up using CSS now and you can have easier, more efficient and quicker updates in the future.

Jedi alleges discrimination in Britain
We can only hope the defense at the trial features numerous clips from the Star Wars movies.

Why CSS is good for Google?

Stylesheets cascading (CSS) are used to separate the stylistic elements of a page such as provision of fonts and color page content such as paragraphs and images. Stylesheets cascading (CSS) provide the presentation layer to a web page. Using CSS, Web designers can control the presentation of the display of a site from a central document.

I would suggest that the advantages to be gained from using CSS, not just for Google, are well worth the time invested in learning it.

So why is CSS good for Google?

CSS allows the file sizes smaller The CSS allows you greater control of page structure CSS allows you to hide certain content from browsers while it still gets picked up by Google

CSS allows the file sizes smaller

HTML page drawing styles and bringing a stylesheet (imported) style sheet (.css file), you can reduce the total amount of code on your Web pages. Pages with less code have smaller file sizes and Google prefers pages with smaller file sizes (many other search engines do too).

Though Google doesn’t offer specific advice on this matter, the search engine optimisation community is generally agreed that 100KB is a good upper limit for page sizes.

The CSS allows you greater control of page structure

The CSS allows you to structure your document as HTML standards without compromising the look-and-feel of the page.

Google rewards pages that are well structured, though many designers choose to ignore standards and guidelines as much as possible, because they (incorrectly) believe standards lead to bland pages. Using CSS, designers can create attractive pages with much flair, while adhering to the find ability design principles identified.

CSS allows you to hide content from browsers while it still gets picked up by Google

Using CSS you can hide content from certain browsers in certain situations. For example you may have some content that you only want to appear in print, or you may want certain content to only be shown on screen and not in print (such as page navigation). The advantage is that Google will still index all of the content and you will still get the benefit that content brings.

Browser Compatibility

If you are new to CSS, be aware that different browsers still interpret CSS standards in different ways, while some (very) old browsers don’t read CSS at all. Ensure that your CSS is as cross-browser compatible as possible, and that your HTML pages look acceptable even without CSS.

LED wins Web site marketing awards
Louisiana Economic Development, the state’s business expansion and recruitment agency, recently received two Internet Advertising Competition awards from the Web Marketing Association, which recognizes excellence in online advertising.

When IF statements are becoming complex, switch offers a block style match to execute a block of code depending on the input expression.

Son charged with mother murder
A man charged with the murder of his 83-year-old mother in Nottinghamshire is remanded after appearing in court.