In 1997 David Siegel wrote a book called “Creating Killer Web Sites” in which he revealed many ways by which web designers could bend HTML to their will. Brilliant - and necessary - in their day, these tricks are 10 years old and within the context of such a fast-changing medium, that alone should tell you something. In practical terms, this dated approach to site coding mixes presentational code together with content in way which is no longer necessary:

• A site’s pages are bigger, therefore slower loading and more expensive to deliver, because most, often all that code has to be included in every single one. The combination of HTML file plus stylesheet is invariably smaller than the original HTML, but the advantage doesn’t stop there. Stylesheets are cached and need be loaded only once to serve a multi-page site.
• Site changes and redesigns involve more labor - and therefore cost - to the extent that many site operators live with poor or outdated designs.
• Webmasters put a lot of effort into search engine optimization, yet many of the techniques are less effective than simply stripping out all the display formatting code to produce a higher content to code ratio.
• With tables, it is much harder to maintain visual consistency throughout a site, but if you do not pay for the extra work needed to ensure that, your site will be less user-friendly and cost you sales.
• Table-based pages are less accessible, not only to visitors with disabilities, but also to the increasing number of people using cell-phones and PDA’s to browse the web.

Of course no-one wants to go back to school when it is easy to keep doing things the way you already understand. Why spend a few days learning something new instead of getting right to work each morning on projects which will earn money? The answer is that using HTML for both styling and content is costing you money, each and every day you resist the change.

Zen Garden is an amazing site for showing how CSS alone - with no changes at all to the underlying HTML - can transform the way a site is displayed. But what practical value is there in that virtue?

• It means that at best you can totally change the appearance of your whole site by making changes to just one file, and at worst that and some new graphics. You don’t need to touch the HTML (which should be a major job if your site has the depth which search engines like).
• Which in turn means you could afford to change your design frequently if you feel it worthwhile. You could drop in seasonal designs cheaply and easily. If you have gone for a magazine-style format as some adult sites have in their member areas, it would take only minutes to change your color scheme to reflect the current magazine. You could even offer a variety of designs via a style switcher.
• You have the opportunity, not only to improve your content to code ratio, but to lay out your HTML in a way which brings your content to the top of your files. With search engines that do not spider whole pages, the advantage is obvious, but that structure also makes your pages more accessible to people visiting your site with non-graphical viewers.

Blogs & CSS

I’m not naturally an evangelist for geekdom. This article was prompted by the number of people claiming to be adult blog designers, of whom not a single one was producing table-less design. Nine months after the original article, valid themes are still the exception.

Which is ridiculous, because blogging software hands its users an automated way to produce modern, user-friendly, search engine-friendly, webmaster-friendly code. Most such software even provides one or two themes, posts, comments, links and templates to show how it all hangs together. All of which is enough to allow hundreds of mainstream designers, amateurs as well as professionals, to stay true to that model and get the maximum advantage from it. Yet the majority of adult designers immediately revert to using code from the 90’s. It is irrelevant that the sites may display as intended: especially when the appeal of blogs is their reputed attractiveness to search engines, it makes no sense to throw a big part of that appeal away through sloppy coding