CSS is the standard and recommended language used to define the appearance of web pages that are written in (X)HTML. The best web designers will make great use of CSS by writing their (X)HTML code in a way that it’s appearance is almost entirely controlled by the CSS.
So what the hell is it?
In simple terms, a web designer will write a page of code — a web page. However the page will only consist of text and images. But you want it to look good right? That’s where CSS comes in.
Web pages comprise of many ‘tags’, ‘classes’ and ‘ID’s’. For example, if you write a paragraph, like the one you are reading now, the code will start with a ‘p’ tag and end with a ‘p’ closing tag. CSS is really useful because you can define how the content contained within these tags will appear — you can define colours, fonts, background images and much much more.
Here is a diagram to explain:
But CSS is much more powerful than that. Take a look at some of these designs to see what today’s designers are doing with CSS.
Why is CSS good?
It’s a standard
CSS is used by the vast majority of top class web designers. It’s going to be the primary language of web design (in some form or another) for many years to come. So having your site designed using CSS is a safe bet for the future.
It’s flexible
If you have a website designed using CSS it’s easy to make future changes to the design without having to make major (or any) changes to the individual pages of the website. In fact you may only need to edit one page — the style sheet.
It’s clean
And it’s neat. By separating the visual design of a website from the textual content you have a very neat basis with which to work. You can create your website exactly as you want it architecturally and build the visual design around this perfect and usable framework.
It’s search engine friendly
Perhaps I shouldn’t give a monkeys about this since there’s much more to marketing a website than the language it’s built with. That said a CSS based website:
- is light and fast, which is good for PPC as well as SEO;
- makes it easier to put the content at the top of the code where it is considered more important by search engines; and
- is a good foundation for on page optimization;
Conclusion
CSS is hugely versatile, functional and enables the production of clean aesthetically pleasing designs. It’s also likely to be here for a long time as the prevalent language of web design. In some cases you might prefer to use flash and in some cases flash is more suitable. The problem with flash is that it is not very versatile. It’s expensive and time consuming. If you’re looking to promote a large brand on the web, flash may be the preferred medium. If you’re looking for an adaptable, testable web page that you can easily tweak for conversion optimization purposes, go for CSS.