5 Great CSS Techniques To Improve Your Website
CSS or Cascading Style Sheets is normally used to separate the style and layout of your HTML files from the actual content. However, few are aware of the added value that CSS can give to your website. Aside from the obvious ones like style standardization, CSS can be utilized to provide other useful stuff not possible with table-based layouts.
Among these benefits are things like:
- Server bandwidth reduction
- Media type formatting
- Menu overlapping
- Styling of form elements
- and even E-mail address obfuscation
Much information about these techniques can be found on the web. Below are some example implementations.
Server bandwidth reduction
CSS Optimization can translate to huge savings in server bandwidth, resulting in lower operational costs.
This article compares some of the best CSS optimizers available on the web by using heavy traffic websites like Digg and Slashdot as an example.
Media type formatting
By utilizing the CSS media attribute, you can easily control display for different media types. This is best used when formatting websites for mobile display and creating printer-friendly pages.
Here is a good tutorial that covers CSS development for mobile browsers. For techniques related to print styling, refer to this tutorial, another tutorial, and this article by Eric Meyer.
Menu overlapping
The CSS z-index property specifies the order an element is stacked, similar to how layers are arranged in Adobe Photoshop. It is also relatively easy to understand, and can be quite powerful when used correctly. It can also come in handy when creating overlapping menus. Here is a very good tutorial on how this can be done.
Styling of form elements
In a previous article we linked to Jeff Howden’s CSS-Only, tableless forms article which gives an example of what can be accomplished with CSS form styling.
Then, there’s also The Form Assembly, a CSS Zen Garden clone for showcasing form designs.
E-mail address obfuscation
When displaying an e-mail address on a website you obviously want to obfuscate it to avoid it getting harvested by spammers. There are many ways to accomplish this, and one such method can easily be implemented in CSS. Silvan Mühlemann tested nine methods and published a test page for spambots to harvest. 1.5 years later the results are out and surprisingly, only the CSS methods resulted in absolutely zero spam.
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