First of all let me begin by saying, I am in love with CSS! For those of you who don't know, CSS is used to control the style and format of a web page. From one CSS file you can control the font attributes, layout attributes, table standards, etc... for an entire site, all in one spot! But I digress...

The reason for this post is to show the speed of CSS-based-layouts over table-based-layouts. Why should one go with CSS design when developing a website/web application? See below...

Sample web layout used for this experiment.

All of our images were the same size for this test and his HTML file was actually smaller than mine! I then uploaded the files to my server, which can be viewed here (CSS Layout and Table Layout) and ran them through a Web Page Analyzer at websiteoptimization.com, the results were amazing!

Results
The CSS-based layout was 33% FASTER than the table-based layout on a T1 connection, and 59% FASTER on a 56K connection.

The CSS-based layout had no "cautions" or "warnings". The table-based layout had a "Total Size Caution" and a "Image Size Warning" even though we used the same image sizes and same amount of images. The total size of the CSS-based page load was 14007 bytes while the table-based page load was 37593 bytes, a 62% DIFFERENCE!

Final Thoughts
Now, don't get me wrong, I like tables, I think they are very useful, but only in their proper place. They were designed for data display and I still use them for that myself if I have tabular data for instance that I need to display. But, for layout and design of a website / web application, there is no question that CSS is the way to go for many different reasons.

So, my final question to you is this... If someone came to you and said "I can make your website run 33% faster", what would you say???

*Speed results will vary depending on site content/layout. Not all results will be 33% faster, some will be less and some will be more.

After months of wanting to redesign my site I have finally did it. It isn't 100 percent complete but it's getting there.

I figured that if I launched the site and then finished it after the launch, I would be more motivated to get it done!

I still have to redesign the blog and add content to a few areas, but the look and feel is DONE.

Let me know what you think, all feedback would be greatly appreciated!

TwoNineMedia will be launching it's new and improved website sometime within the next few weeks. The new site will feature a complete CSS layout with BlogCFC redesigned to fit the new look and feel.

12/6/06 - Update: It's coming give me another week or two!

So, you have an unordered list that you want to look pretty, huh? Well, I ran into this problem here at work a little while back, and it was requested I share the solution with all.

Problem:

We were (and still are) building a web app, where the navigation would be dynamic based on the user and their permissions, and each nav item could have children under it, sub-items. So we needed to come up with a CSS solution to the problem with a tad bit of JavaScript to make IE happy.

Now, we used a recursive function to query the database for all of the nav items for a user with their children, and possibly their children's children and so on, and when we looped through this result set with ColdFusion, here was a look alike of the nav html that was generated.

Which looks like this displayed:

Solution:

So what I did was go out on the net and try to find something to fix this problem, and found this solution.

First of all, you will notice that the unordered list has an ID as well as the list item and anchor tag having a class where there are children. With that accomplished, now we just need two more things. Number one some CSS to make it look pretty and secondly a behavior file for IE.

CSS:

Behavior File:

Click here to download the htc behavior file.

Final Result:

Click Here To See A Live Demo!

This has been very useful for me, I hope it helps you as well!

I have been in the web world for around 5 years now, and when I first learned how to build a web page, my layouts were based on HTML tables. Now thanks to Cascading Style Sheets (which are nothing new) I have practically abandoned tables and now design with strictly CSS.

I used to fear CSS. I would look at a style sheet and think that tables were so much better. Until a few years ago, I figured out that you could create some nifty little rollovers with just an HTML anchor tag and a bit of CSS. Before I used to create rollover images in Photoshop and slice them up creating nifty rollovers which took forever to load.

CSS is all about freedom, optimization, beauty and ease of future manageability. With CSS you can change the look of a site quickly from one look and feel to another with the swapping out of a style sheet. No more going through pages of code and HTML to try to swap out all of the image names and possibly reposition things, CSS allows you to do all this cleaner, quicker, and all from one file.

Case In Point

At work we are developing a completely web-based totally configurable web enrollment system for the health care industry. Part of my task thus far have been to create the look and feel for the application. This app will be used by multiple clients, and each client will most likely want their own look and feel to the app, not a logo change, but an entire look and feel.