Recently, with the interest in standards-compliant websites, the separation of content and design has become a priority for many web designers. There are two main reasons for this, and both make good sense for the designer and the business owner and the site visitor.

Supposing you want to add a new page of content to your site, or alter some information that appears on an existing web page. If the content of your site is under a pile of nested tables, hiding in individual cells and among important style and spacing tags, changing anything will be a time consuming business. The situation is even worse if you want to change the design of your site – every page must go through the time-consuming process of content salvaging and style editing. Of course, only a web designer can possibly be capable of performing such changes.

But what if your content was all held in one nice, clean xhtml document for each page? What if all the style information was in a separate CSS (cascading style sheet) file? Then, you could easily add a new page of content, edit existing content, or replace the CSS file with a new, pre-prepared one, and completely alter the design of the site in an instant. CSS Zen Garden is a lovely example of how beautiful, powerful and versatile CSS web design can be.

So the first clear benefit of separated design and content to the designer, the business owner and the visitor is that design and content of a site can be updated easily in seconds. The second benefit is that search engines like easy-to-index sites, and a site which has a CSS file containing all the style information which is separate from the content xhtml file is definitely easy to index. There are far fewer confusing tags for the search engine to work around; all the content is right there where it can see it, and you are likely to see a degree of improvement in your search engine rankings.

There are one or two other benefits worth considering. CSS/XHTML websites display consistently across almost all up-to-date browsers. and degrade gracefully in older browsers. Users of screen readers and Braille printers will also find your site easier to use. In general, complying with web standards is a wise idea for a whole range of accessibility and usability reasons, and websites with neatly separated design and content are one step closer to being standards-compliant.

By Natalie Catchpole

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