Project Overview

Rick Farrell, president of Tangent Knowledge came to us with a completed website. All he needed was someone to maintain it, and perform weekly updates, additions, and modifications. Whenever I work on a website I didn’t personally build its always interesting.

In this particular case we encountered a few challenges that had to be overcome from the the initial design:

• Table based layout
• Very minimal use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
• Absolutely NO analytic software in place
• No graphic project files were included - only the flattened .gifs
• Javascript is relied upon heavily for the Navigation Menu - (I prefer CSS Based Navigation)
• There is no template and/or PHP includes to work with

I will say that graphically it is pleasing enough to the eye not to warrant a complete redesign, so that was good for us and cost effective for the client.

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Quite a few years ago a couple of gentlemen by the name of Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau invented the World Wide Web. A system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the internet - a system that would change the way the vast majority of the world trades information.

Within these hypertext documents lies information. Not just the information you see on a web page, but information that controls the design and layout of the page itself. The vast majority of the pages you see on the internet are laid out using one of two methods, either tables, or cascading style sheets (CSS).

There is no reason to argue the use of one over the other, as CSS is already known to be superior, but I will point out a few reasons why I personally use CSS for mine (and my clients) web designs:

1. CSS based layouts are very search engine friendly. Using CSS helps eliminate unnecessary javascript mouseover effects.  This will make your navigation menus cleaner, and easier for search engines to read.  If a search engine has problems reading your navigation they may not find all the pages within your website.  See an apples-to-apples comparison on the code required to power one of Google’s navigation menu here.
2. CSS layouts are flexible. In a CSS based layout you have several options for positioning elements within your page.  Let them flow in the order they appear in the code, or tell certain DIVs to float left, and others to float right.  Here is a good example of this - a web page that uses a single HTML file, but lets you toggle between several style sheets to reorganize the page.
3. CSS is lightweight. Using CSS will ‘thin down’ the HTML required in a web page.  This will decrease load times, and the strains on your servers.
4. CSS design is beautiful. Just ask these guys - www.csszengarden.com.  This is a great showcase of the capabilities of CSS based design.

If you’ve got any compelling reasons to use table based layouts I’d love to hear them.  Until then I’ll stick to CSS!