New Boston Creative Group

by Chris Ostrom on November 12, 2009

For a small business, contracting for web design services is a lot like buying a car. You don’t need to know how the internal combustion engine works, but you do need to know the power and fuel efficiency differences between a V8 and a hybrid. You don’t need to understand antilock brakes, but you do need to know that they are safer than standard disc brakes. Similarly, you don’t need a Herculean grasp on mundane web conventions, like cascading style sheets or CSS, but you do need to know why they are important and why any well-designed website should use them.

To put it simply (and to beat this automotive simile to death), CSS is like a West Coast Customs makeover for your website. HTML and web application code handle your site’s content and backend processes — that is, providing the engine, drive train, onboard computer — all the things that help your audience get from point A to point B and make a website functional and dependable. Meanwhile, the CSS provides the hand-rubbed, candy red polyurethane clear-coat finish, the 32-inch Asanti rims, even the fuzzy dice — all the things that give your site a consistent and cohesive sense of style and “pimpalicious flava.”

Among other things, CSS tells the web browser what dimensions the different regions of your pages should be; where key information should be placed; what colors, fonts, font sizes, and paragraph spacing to display; what background, button, and accent images should be used; and so forth.

Back in the stone ages of the late 90s and early 00s, it was standard design practice to embed all the style and layout information for a page in the HTML code itself, which made pages somewhat unwieldy and bloated, and made the task of performing global changes to a site’s look or layout much more difficult.

Let’s say you have a site with 500 pages of information. Before CSS (and content management systems…a topic for another blog), in order to alter the layout or style of your site, you were stuck either starting over or changing all 500 pages individually. Because CSS allows the designer to separate out all the style and layout information into a single instruction file or style sheet, it becomes possible to make site-wide changes, even “reskinning” or “retheming” the entire site, by simply changing the style sheet.

What’s more, the HTML files on CSS-based websites tend to be cleaner and more information-focused — which (if done right) makes them more standards-compliant, machine-readable, and accessible, and better optimized for search engines. Not to mention the fact that, with CSS, you can have multiple style sheets for multiple purposes. Want to optimize your site for BlackBerries and other mobile devices? You can do so with a mobile style sheet. Want to format pages for printing? You can do that with a print style sheet.

Okay, you’re probably wondering, why do I need to know this again? The main reason is that, as awesome as cascading style sheets are, they took a long time to catch on — and not everyone uses them well even today. The most recent standards for CSS were created in 1997, but it took web browsers a long time to integrate full support for them, and it took even longer for designers to move away from table-based HTML design and page-embedded “inline” style information.

Today, even as all contemporary browsers support CSS, and even as most designers use CSS for styling text, many still do not make full use of CSS for doing clean, powerful, “tableless” layouts.

So, if you glean anything from the few minutes you’ve squandered here, it’s to question your web designer or firm when seeking out design services in the same way you’d question a Vitalis-headed, Old-Spice-wearing, polyester-clad salesperson on a car lot. When asked, “What will it take to get you into a website today?” your first response should be, “Standards-compliant, tableless, CSS-based layouts. No CSS, no (fuzzy) dice.”

If you accept anything less, you’ll be driving home a lemon.