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North Square completes its evaluation of the new Allerdale Council website. North Square has worked for 26 councils in the UK.
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(January 2008)
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>> Page 2: Benefits Of Using Cascading Style Sheets
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07 August 2007
Organisations have been slow at fully implementing Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Many have used HTML transitional and introduced some elements of Style Sheets but have not gone on to make full use of them.
In this article, we have summarised the benefits of fully introducing CSS, and on page 2, we have included some examples demonstrating the power of CSS. In the past, developers have been conscious of poor browser support and inconsistencies with CSS but most of those issues have almost disappeared. Developers who iteratively test their website with constant cross-browser checks will find it relatively straight forward to harness the full power and benefits of CSS.
In April 2005, we wrote an article about the benefits of using the latest XHTML standard. We encourage you to read that article because it links closely with this one.
By using a single, external Style Sheet to control elements, developers can save a great deal of time. There is no need to edit each page individually. By freeing up time, developers can work on other projects.
Centrally controlled Style Sheets mean that companies can now easily create consistent, company-wide style and branding guidelines.
In the latest CSS standards, there are new controls that were not available in HTML. Refer to page 2 for some examples.
With Style Sheets, you will be removing elements that were embedded into every HTML page and placing them into a single file CSS file. This file will be saved onto your users' computers and will get re-used from their computer each time a new page is requested. This means that pages will load quicker and will place less burden on your servers.
Given that file sizes will almost certainly be smaller (assuming that CSS has been introduced correctly), hosting costs should reduce.
With greater control over design, it becomes easier to replace images that contain text with standard HTML text. In our old website for example, our primary navigation bar used images, but we have replaced them with standard text, which means the search engines can follow the links.
In the early days of the internet, developers only had to think about designing for screen and print. Many developers have created separate print-friendly pages which either require a lot of time to set-up, or are not updated as frequently as the main website. They also mean that users cannot print from the function in their browser; instead they have to find the link on the web page itself. Many developers just do not bother to make their pages print-friendly.
In the latest XHTML and CSS standards, developers easily modify the layout and style of the pages, creating a CSS file for all the devises that are currently being used to access web pages; print, handheld, braille, television etc. For more on this subject, see Creating Printer-friendly pages with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
All users have greater control over how a website is displayed. For example, those with poor eye-sight can increase the size of fonts (as long as variable font sizes are used). Most modern browsers allow users to load pages using their own style sheets.
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