Your JoeDog has a new look and feel!
The theme remains the same but we’re rocking a better architecture. The previous version was close to six years old and I made a poor design decision. What was that? I used HTML tables instead of CSS. It was a bad decision then but it’s inexcusable now. Don’t use HTML tables …. ever!
Why’s that?
CSS has numerous advantages over HTML.
- It eliminates the need for a clipboard. If somebody refers to you as a copy-and-paste programmer, that’s not a compliment. Redundant code is hard to maintain. CSS allows you to manage pages with a single file.
- HTML tables contain large amounts of markup. With CSS, you can reduce much of that, lower your site’s overhead and create faster loading pages.
- Site redesign is so much more efficient with CSS because it decouples content from its presentation.
- CSS is better for SEO because it boosts your content to code ratio and it better enables you to signal which items you want to emphasize.
- And the biggest reason CSS is superior to HTML: NO SPACER.GIFs
Now Your JoeDog is no CSS design expert but he knows what he likes: a header and three columns — one for navigation, one for content and one for ads. You’re not blocking his ads, are you? They help pay the bills.
Fortunately, Matthew James Taylor is a CSS expert. To create this new design, Your JoeDog incorporated his Three-column Holy Grail. Taylor achieves cross platform compatibility and SEO friendliness without resorting to hacks, images or javascript. The design uses 2-1-3 column ordering. So while you’re viewing these words in column number two, search bots are viewing them in column number one. Clever!
I highly recommend his templates. If you’re having difficulty implementing them, feel free to steal code and ideas from this website. (In particular, look for the .main #content tag. Your JoeDog used that to prevent Taylor’s floating blocks from crushing his margins and padding.