your questions
Q. What is accessibility and why does it matter?
A. The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA) makes it illegal for companies to provide an inferior service to, or discriminate against, a disabled person. This legislation extends to websites. Using XHTML and CSS means that visually impaired persons can use screen readers to understand the content of your site.
The Web is an increasingly important resource in many aspects of life: education, employment, government, commerce, health care, recreation, and more. It is essential that the Web be accessible in order to provide equal access and equal opportunity to people with disabilities. An accessible Web can also help people with disabilities more actively participate in society.
Conforming to these standards not only means that you are complying with the law, but also opening up your business to people with disabilities which can translate into additional revenue. With a large disposable income it would be crazy to turn this business away.
Q. What is a content management system and why do I need one?
A. A content management system holds all your information in a database and then publishes it to the web in an established design and layout. This means that you can easily update your site from anywhere with an internet connection. Maintaining your own content will reduce your site maintenance costs, enhance your search engine position and increase your site visits.
Q. What is CSS and how can it help us?
A. CSS stands for "cascading style sheets". A single CSS file can contain positioning, layout , font, colors and style information for an entire web site. The file can be referenced by each html file on the site.
CSS is a means of separating the content of an html document from the style and layout of that document. It's useful to be able to do this for a number of reasons:
Making changes to the layout
CSS makes it very easy to change the style of a document. Let's say we wanted to move a picture on a page to the right by 10 pixels. This would be a nightmare in a table based design. We would have to open every page and alter the table width manually.
Fortunately we have used CSS, and all we have to do is open our CSS file which stores the layout of the site, and change the number relating to the position of the image. That will change its position throughout the whole site.
The look and layout of a site can be changed beyond recognition just by altering the CSS file. This makes CSS indispensable for large web sites.
File Size
Probably the mostly useful feature of CSS is that all of the style and layout is removed from the html, so the html page size is very much smaller. The CSS file is downloaded just once by the visitor's browser and re-used for different pages on a web site. This reduces the bandwidth requirements for your server and also ensures a faster download for your visitors.
Search Engines
A search engine robot will normally consider the content in the start of your html code is more important than the text towards the end of the code. For a table based page the contents of the navigation bar will normally show up as the page description in search engine results. With a CSS page the navigation can be moved to the bottom of the source code, so the search engine displays your content instead of your navigation.
Accessibility
Separating style from content makes life very easy for visitors who prefer to view only the content of a web page, or to modify the content. These could be blind or partially sighted people who might use a screen reader to interpret a page.
Consistency
Layout and position of navigation can be completely consistent across a site.
So to summarise:
CSS/XHTML sites are more search engine friendly because they contain 50% less code and their structure is semantically correct, making it easier for search engines to determine your site's content.
CSS/XHTML sites are more accessible to people with low vision, physical, and learning disabilities.
CSS/XHTML web pages download 50% faster..
