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CSS

CSS stands Cascading Style Sheets and they are very important in the modern internet. CSS allows the content of a web page such as the words, links and images to be held in one file and for all of the style information such as fonts, colours and layout to be held in a separate file. Separating content and styling allows:

different styles to be applied for different media - One css file can describe how to display the pages of a site on screen and another one can describe how they should be styled when printed. This saves the need for a “printer friendly version” button and its associated overheads. Other files could provide formatting for small screens like on PDAs, mobile phones or other types of browsers.

Accessibility - When the content of a page is formatted using CSS rather than embedded styles, it can be easily read by special browsers which may present pages by voice or on braille-based, tactile devices. Partially sighted users may discard the site’s css files and use their own css files which improve font sizes or contrast to help them read the pages on screen.

search engine optimisation - Search engines have to index all of the pages on the internet in order to find pages with requested words or phrases on them. When pages are cluttered with embeded style information, this can interfere with the data and may mean a page is not indexed accurately. When the style information is in a separate CSS file, the search engine can easily ignore all of the style information. This not only means your pages are more likely to be found but it can also improve their rankings.

maintenance - Any number of pages on a site can use the same CSS files. If there is a need to change styles on all pages of the site (changes logo, font, corporate colour, etc), the change can be made in one place within the CSS file and instantly every page of the site will be displayed with the new styling which makes site maintenance much more efficient.

All our web work uses CSS rather than embedded styles. If you want to know more about CSS and how it works, we would be happy to explain it all in more detail.

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