Why Use CSS?

Ease of site maintenance

CSS offers many benefits to site administrators. Like using templates and library items in Dreamweaver, CSS allows site wide editing of styles from one location. There is no need to update pages -- once the style sheet has been attached, simply make your style changes and upload the CSS file. Maintaining your styles in this manner also introduces site wide consistency in visual presentation. CSS is easy to use and is widely implemented, and it is a mature technology that is built on the forward-thinking foundation.

Flexibility

With CSS, you maintain better control over your page elements and components. For site administrators working with Dreamweaver (and Contribute), you control what styles are available for your content providers.

And when it comes time for a site redesign, most of the visual presentation of your site can be redesigned by editing the CSS files.

Accessibility

Since CSS helps you to present a site with the content separated from design specifications, your pages are inherently more accessible for those site visitors using assistive technologies (such as screen readers, screen magnifiers, etc.). And lean code with improved page structure is also more accessible for alternate access devices (such as handheld browsers, web-enabled cell phones, etc.).

Speed

Since the CSS file is read by the browser and stored in memory, your pages will load faster because the code to style the visual elements is not included in every page. CSS-based pages are also faster to draw in the browser window than HTML table-based layouts.

Separating content from presentation

As more site administrators move to web-based content management systems, your CMS-based site is easier to maintain with CSS since the content is separated from the visual markup code. This also allows administrators to easily reposition content (such as RSS news feeds) and restyle content (such as using a separate style sheet for the purposes of printing).