CSS - do it or not?

hi everyone, i was wondering just been looking at CSS and was wondering should i learn it or is it a waste of time? Iv read a few programmes saying you must learn it as macromedia general properties creates spam tags? Any help would be great

Katy

hey thanks for replying and this does help yes. Going to get my head around CSS now thanks very much

Definetely YES. Tables are out of day, makes the HTML code longer, breaks the semantic estructure of your pages, destroy your keyword density and I can carry on for ever

So CSS is worthy

You should know it for sure, however the "programmers" who tell you macromedia creates spam tags are incorrect. There is no such this as a "spam tag", besides macromedia is no longer, it is all now owned, produced and distributed under Adobe. Adobe has done an excellent job of utilizing CSS in the latest version of Dreamweaver, but even Go Live, old dreamweaver, imageready all of them dont produce any code which is bad for search engines.

basically dont think that by learning css you will jump into the top of the rankings or assume that "macromedias spam code" is the reason your website doesnt rank.

Spend your time building great links and good content, not learning CSS.

I've been building purely with CSS for around 4 years now. The other day I had to go back into an old tables site to adjust some things. WHAT A NIGHTMARE!

Once you know your way around it, CSS layouts are much easier to set up and more importantly, MUCH EASIER to maintain. Having the ability to make changes across the board is vital to the longevity of a website.

Also, you cut down on code and time to download.

One of the great features is the ability to set up your page so that Google reads your content first instead of garbage code from banners, headers, ads, etc... This gives Google an immediate sense of relevance to the topic.

Tables are dead. VIVA CSS!

Maybe they said "span" tags and not "spam" tags.

CSS makes changing any font or table color a breeze. It's definitely the way to go. I recommend learning it, or at least learn how to use it in DreamWeaver.

Whilst I am a big fan of XHTML and CSS from an SEO propsective it makes very little difference. Infact even code validity and standards compliance have little real world effect on rankings.

Thats not to say that they wont be used as a measure of quality in the future or that they may be considered already.

So I would say that there is no practical reason to change the site's code but any future site updates and any newly coded sites should use XHTML and CSS.

From a developers point of view XHTML and CSS are a dream to use versus tables. Especially if you do everything manually in nitepad as I so.

CSS is very useful to learn in any event.

its really worth learning... make sure to save some CSS for your site as different file and just call it your page..

CSS is very useful for styling, it is not bad. The only bad is when you use CSS intentionally to trick search engines by hiding text and presenting different to users.

Over the past week we just cleaned up ours a little to. We use Drupal on that site. We noticed that the newer versions of Drupal are using CSS less. We have not played too much with the later version, but it appears there is a dashboard now that handles a lot of those issues.