10 Advantages of Using Tabless CSS Web Design Techniques

What is tableless web design?

In simple words, tableless web design is basically a method whereby page layout control is achieved without the use of HTML tables. Instead, text and other elements on a page are arranged using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). This language is the brainchild of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). It was designed in such a way as to improve web accessibility as well as to make use of HTML for semantic purposes rather than presentational purposes.

Below is a quick list of 10 advantages of using tabless web design techniques in your next web design project.

1. Separate content from presentation. An external style sheet can contain all the styles for your web site, then if you want to change the content you only have to edit one style sheet. This is great for a web site that contains hundreds or thousands of pages. This keeps your development time low and your web design clients happy!

2. Google and search engine benefits. Google gives more weight to content closer to the top of your HTML document. Search engines spider the content that comes first in your source code. With CSS you can easily structure the content to appear first with the rest of the source code following it. This will help outrank your competitors who may have their navigation appear first and their content last. Using the power of CSS to manage your page content can greatly improve you search engine keyword ranking.

3. Fast loading pages. Tables slow down the loading of your pages because the spider has to crawl through all the code required to build each table. If your tables are nested inside each other your page will load even more slowly. Designing CSS-based web pages will speed up the loading of your pages considerably because most of your display code is all contained in one style sheet.

4. Small file size. CSS will reduce the file size of your html document. If you look at a web page that is designed with CSS you will notice that the size is very small compared to one designed with lots of tables. This also helps reduce load times and improve your website search engine ranking.

5. Reduce website code clutter. CSS allows you to get rid of a lot of extraneous html code therefore making your site code neater your files smaller. This makes it easy to alter the code if you need to make edits as well as improving your overall search engine page performance.

6. Use heading tags. Search engines weight text included inside a heading tag with a higher importance than normal page text. Use CSS to control the layout attributes of your heading tags to give yourself even better search engine rankings.

7. Accessibility. If you use CSS2's aural properties it provides information to non-sighted users and voice-browser users. The CSS2 "media types" allow authors and users to design style sheets that will cause documents to render more appropriately for certain useful accessibility devices.

8. Save time. CSS will allow you to design your site much faster than tables because there are some elements you can use for every site.

9. Flexibility of design. You can use pixel precision in your web site designs. By adjusting the margins and padding of the CSS you can easily adjust the position of your content. You can also create very modern designs that can't be duplicated with tables. For example you can use a background image for a header then place your content over it using the H1 tag for better page optimization.

10. Printer friendly. When a user chooses to print a web page an alternative CSS document can be called up. This document can specify that formatting, images and navigation disappear and just the page content appear on the printed version.

There are many more advantages to using CSS for your website design but this is a good start.