David Fiske A subtle blend of affiliate marketing and web development

There are still quite a few people who don't understand SEO. That's fine. Not everyone needs to understand it.

But many overlook the design aspect of it.
 
CSS has been around for ages but it is only with the advent of web 2.0 has it become more prominent.

When designing a website, you should keep the style and the content separate. Use HTML to control your content and CSS to control the look of said content.

I'm all self taught so it proves there are enough resources online as well as some god CSS books out there.

So why bother?

Accessibility laws in the UK state that your website has to be accessible. Regardless of whether you are a business or a part timer, you need to be building accessible sites. These need to work even if the images, CSS and JavaScript / AJAX is turned off.

The majority of beginner's websites are table based - that is, they use tables to control where the navigation bar goes, where the content goes, etc. This is wrong. Some browsers do not work with tables very well. Tables should be used for data, price comparisons, etc. and not layout, that's CSS's job!

But above and beyond this, there is an SEO benefit too. Googlebot doesn't see websites as we do. It doesn't invoke JavaScripts or AJAX scripts. It doesn't see what is in the picture. It doesn't read tables as we do. It looks at what's in your HTML.

If your HTML has 100 lines of table formatting then your content, the bot will place more relevance on your table structure than your content. If your HTML is well structured (xHTML 1.0 Strict is my current preference!) with all your style information in a CSS file, it will place more weighting on your content.

Using CSS files will also help you. Want to change your background colour? Bit of a pain with 1,000 pages. With CSS, make one change to one six digit (hexadecimal) code and your entire site will change.

So come on people, design for the future! Learn to code websites that pass the XHTML 1.0 Strict validation test. It may be hard work building a compliant site but it is worth it in the end for dozens of reasons!

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