| Frames, Tables & CSS OH MY!
The current state of web development.
At one time, building a website in basic html and frames was state of the art (about 10 years ago). It seemed very cool that you could put the header on every page and have new content load with every page without having to reload the header. But there was one downside. The search engines saw nothing on the page. Ditto, Nada, Nothing. All the content was hidden. Suddenly, as fast as frames became cool, they fell out of favor. Surprisingly, a few coders are still using them - it takes time and effort to keep up with the times.
When frames fell out of favor (not to be confused with an iframe which is still a useful tool to bring content into a page), "tables" took over. They provided a way to display a complicated design in early browsers. The downside was images had to be "sliced and diced" which is exactly what it sounds like. The images were chopped up into little pieces and put in table boxes along with the content. It was rigid but it worked. However, the search engines weren't that fond of them either as screen readers and search engines had a hard time sorting out what was important and what was a piece of picture because of all the excess code tables generated. Many sites are still done with tables, mainly because they are easy to build and view ok in most browsers, though they still have serious search issues. If you're not getting the rankings you desire, it's probably because your site was built with frames and not optimized.
Then along came CSS and XHTML. Finally a solution to the search engines seeing code hieroglyphics instead of content! Items could be placed on the page without junk code littering the page and confusing the search engines! The search engine saw content FIRST, and indexed a page properly. It wasn't perfect (not every browser wanted to agree once again), but it worked better than the other two and gave sites a fighting chance on the search engines. Most good developers now build this way, and sites that are redesigned with CSS tend to go right to the top of search when they have old-style frame & table competition.
So a good reason for updating and improving your site is that technology has moved on. A site that was state of the art 5 years ago is probably showing it's age (my guess is it was done with tables). When you don't keep up, you fall behind. The advantage of using CSS is that if you ever decide to change your site's look, it's a much simpler process. CSS incorporates the advantages of frames (only one heading to change) with the layout ability of tables - but it goes one step further - it's fluid rather than rigid, loads pages faster and can adapt better to a wider variety of monitor sizes and resolutions available today - and best of all the search engines LOVE it.
So time marches on...no doubt something one day will replace CSS - but not any time soon because while frames & tables were adaptations to a newly evolving web - sort of a jury-rigged way of displaying images and text early on - CSS is a planned strategy by the web overseers at WC3 - coding developed specifically for displaying complex web pages on a monitor (rather than a cathode ray tube used by the early web). CSS was a language planned to grow with the web without necessitating constant "rebuilds". While your design may one day become "dated" your underlying site structure will not. If you have not had your site recoded into CSS, it could benefit you greatly to have it done. |
