When I see a local business’ site, even perhaps a web design business’ site and use the Firefox Web Developer Extention to ‘remove all CSS styles’, sometimes there is pretty much no change at all, or the biggest change might be that the type changes back to the default font 10pt Times New Roman. Try order tramadol on your site. Or have someone more tech-savvy show you if you’re less-inclined.

You should see a long list of text, headers and paragraphs, one after the other listed vertically. No layout whatsoever. If not, get a new web designer. If your web person scratches their head at the mention of ‘firefox’ or even the rather ubiquitous web developer extension for it, get a new web designer

I’m not out to point fingers, but rather to prod people into being aware of these issues of the standards movement. This isn’t just some fuzzy-headed ivory tower but generally impractical BS. Streamlined pages, ease of updating/redesigning, faster-loading pages on the user’s end, greater search engine visibility, yes you want these things. Anyone complaining about the impracticality of CSS most likely is a person who doesn’t understand it well enough.

And it WORKS! After experimenting around a little, I realized that my site is in the first page of Google results for search terms that are mentioned in passing on one of my pages, simply because my site doesn’t have a bunch of layout tables in the way, and the competition for those search terms are still using viagra online order cialis buy levitra table-and-markup-heavy sites, like the way we did things back in the 90’s. There are other factors in search engine rankings to be sure, but building your site correctly makes such a difference!
So if you’re in Middle America (besides Chicago, heh) and your web site is devoid of tables used for layout, hooray for you! See you at the top.

The major concern though, is that although the new Internet Explorer is more ’standards-complient’ than before, this may change how your website renders. If outmoded methods and/or ‘hacks’ were used to make your website ‘behave’ in the often unruly Internet Explorer 6 (as opposed to the more standards-complient browsers like Firefox and Safari for the Mac) then it could yeild unpredictable results in the new IE. IE 6 was/is a mish-mash of proprietary IE-only supported elements and off-based rendering, is the gist of it, without getting too technical. IE is getting more standards-complient, but it’s not perfect yet, so get the update early and check your sites!

Speaking of which, while IE on Windows is still certainly the most popular browser/platform combo out there, there are many others to speak of. Does your site work, or degrade gracefully, in all of them? But that’s another subject

It’s great to hear people promoting the use of css-based layouts, and that more people are using them here in the industry, instead of using code-heavy table-based layouts. And yes, css does work for layout - you just have to know how to use it.

I also talked about content management, and there were discussions regarding how we would use the internet in the future, safety issues, and calling people to action using e-mail marketing.

Sure there are a bunch of people out there who practice it and blog about it, but as the article also mentions, the chance that there are many people in the web industry, in your locality, who use best practices are most likely few.

I get the feeling that it isn’t the highest priority around here that websites use modern standards. They seem like an abstract idea, or some technical craziness, that we don’t need to worry about. As long as the site works, who cares right?

But as long as you’re spending money and resources to put up a web site, why not have it load faster, be eaiser to update and be closer to the top of the list of search engine results? Why alienate any amount of people who use screen readers or other accesability devices?

It’s not just some fuzzy-headed ivory tower notion to have standard-compliant websites; it also affects business’ bottom line. Chances are, you aren’t doing business the exact same way you were 10 years ago, so why would a web designer -of all people- be doing things the same way?

blue: for links (the A tag)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

—————————–

Notably, not pictured:
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
Which is a good thing because there’s no tabular data to be seen on there!  ; )

Also, not overly many div’s and the only img tags used are the portfolio thumbnails.  These are images that are qualify as actual content, and are not just ‘for decoration’ and presentation of the site.