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Why do we use Cascading Style Sheets?

What are Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)?

Cascading style sheets contain all of the styling elements of your websites e.g. font colour, font size, background colour, image positions etc. In a separate file, this is then linked to the HTML of your web pages.

Before CSS all the style elements used to be contained within the HTML of your web pages. Making the HTML messy and cluttered, as well as this each webpage had to contain the styles making each page bigger and the overall site larger in size.

What are the advantages of CSS?

There are many advantages of using CSS to create websites, here at Iconet every website we create uses CSS, to see the advantages of this and why we use CSS please read below;

Neater HTML Pages

One of the advantages of using CSS is that the styles of the website are contained in a separate file, making the code in the HTML pages a lot neater and less cluttered. This also reduces the overall size of your site, making your site faster to load.

Smaller file sizes

Probably the most useful feature of CSS is that all of the style and layout elements are removed from the html, so the html page size is a lot smaller. When you visit a website your browser will download the websites CSS file just once. This reduces the loading time of your website and also reduces the bandwidth requirements for your server.

Using CSS to create your website allows you to hide certain content from the internet browsers; this could be useful in different situations. For example if visitors to your website wanted to print a copy of a webpage out, you may only want certain content to be printed.

A good example is that you would want the site navigation to be shown on screen but not in print. The advantage of using CSS to do this is that Google will still index all of the content; you will also receive the full benefit of that content.

Modifying the Layout of a webpage

If your website was made without using CSS it could be an expensive and time consuming job to change even minor elements of your website. This is because you would have to go through every page of your website and alter the styles on each page.

But because here at Iconet we create all our websites using CSS all we have to do is open the CSS and change the relevant styles once in there. This will then affect all the pages of your website. Using CSS allows you to make minor changes to your website quickly, thus bringing the cost down of any changes you wish to make to your website in the future.

Accessibility

Separating style from content makes life very easy for visitors who prefer to view only the content of a web page, or to modify the content. These could be blind or partially sighted people who might use a screen reader to interpret a page.

Greater control of page structure

CSS allows you to structure your document according to HTML standards without compromising the look-and-feel of the web page. Google rewards pages that are well structured. Using CSS, website designers can create eye catching pages, while still staying to the key search aspects of Google.

If you require a website that performs better with Google and other search engines, or you already have a site that is not performing as well as you would like, then call Iconet today on 01527 837 873 to see how we can help to improve your business through increased website traffic.

Ben Towler, Web Design Assistant, Iconet