Valid Cascading Style Sheets
Gardner Information Design uses cascading style sheets in all its front-end web development and custom web design work.
The CSS Validation Service at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) provides The W3C CSS icon to indicate that a page uses valid cascading style sheets (CSS).
Test the cascading style sheet for this page (new site):
Why is this important?
The fact that we use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is important to you because sites can be more easily redesigned. It means that we can make rapid changes to the look and feel of your website. We can change the formatting or colors of an entire site almost instantly.
Cascading style sheets are at the heart of fluid page design and flexible fonts, as well as rapid prototyping and web accessibility. Style sheets save you costs during initial design, plus site redesign becomes much simpler as the needs of your site change.
Using Cascading style sheets means design features and content elements are created separately. Separating content from visual design dramatically improves search rankings.
Style sheets also let your visitors customize the view of your site for themselves, a feature that provides more accessibility for more people. They can't do this successfully when formatting is embedded into Web pages.
View the examples below to learn about how cascading style sheets work.
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CSS Design
To demonstrate the separation of style from content, here is the home page of this web site without its style sheet:
Navigate the entire web site without its style sheet, or view this page side by side with its text version:
This is the view of the site as it appears to search engines, as well as to people with screen readers and other adaptive devices.
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Client Example
All the sites GIDI builds for our small business customers work the same way. Every site listed in our Custom Website Portfolio has a separate cascading style sheet, and all of them resize to fit the space available in the browser window.
Here is just one example, a web site built for Oceanus Consulting, one of GIDI's small business customers, demonstrating the site both with and without its cascading style sheet. Designs using cascading style sheets make site modifications much easier, and make sites easier and cheaper to maintain.
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Navigate the Oceanus web site with and without its style sheet:
The client's previous web site was built with a cumbersome content management system and a fixed layout template that utilized dynamically generated menus. These menus prevented search engines from traversing most of the site and impeded proper search standings. The content management system also made the site very difficult to maintain.
After the redesign, the content of the web site is now completely available to search engines like Google and Yahoo— not to mention people with disabilities, older web browsers, and hand-held devices.
Making site changes has become substantially easier.
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