Which Is Best Practice?

when it comes to SEO and website design - what is best practice?

a website with CSS & Tables?

OR

CSS & XHTML?

or does it not matter?

 

tables are for displaying tabular data. spread sheets and the like. each time a page is loaded that is based on tables, the weight of the files that need to be downloaded are hideous compared to it's css counterpart. and in return, causes the table based websites to load rather slow compared to a purely css design. and then after all is said and done, the css is cached so it wont have to be downloaded again unless it changes or you request it to be. bandwidth costs money and by using a more accessible approach with css not only do you get better load times and the like, but you're also saving your host money on bandwidth because it doesn't have to send all of that data to each visitor. just one file, downloaded once. it also helps make visual consistancy through the pages of your site a lot easier to manage and not to mention making redesign as simple as changing a line or two. and as for SEO purposes, you'll definately get better search engine results by using css over tables anyday.

hope this helped you out some.
ansi

 

for me its css and table.. i find it more neat on designing...

 

It depends who are your visitors. If your visitors use older browsers go with tables. If it's easier for you to use tables, use tables. It will not affect your bandwidth that much. Pictures and animations are the problem.

From the SEO point of view it's better to have more actual content on the website than hundreds of <tr><td> tags.

 

Plenty of websites rank very well with tables. Whether you have tables or css divs is way down the list of what search engines care about. Like the person above stated, though, if you have a huge number of tables or cells, it can greatly affect your code to content ratio.

So, don't worry if you have a table or too, but don't overload your page.

 

table and CSS for me!

 

same for me .

 

me too .

 

I can't speak from an SEO standpoint on this matter, but from a strictly web standards point-of-view the best practice is definitely to use CSS with XHTML.

 

I agree with you...plus this is the best way to ensure your site looks the same on all platforms....a table layout can look different on firefox, IE and opera

 

fully agreed too. Tables shld always be avoided when possible.....

 

For SEO it's more good if your site done in CSS based as long as not distorted with other Browsers. Also CSS has a big Effect in terms of loading your page.

 

Use an external CSS file for improving the page loading time.
Try using DIV not TABLE and make sure that your page is XHTML valid.

 

when it comes to SEO and website design - what is best practice? both of them are very improtant and both have their own parts to play

a website with CSS & Tables?I would prefer CSS

OR

CSS & XHTML?Both

or does it not matter? Yes it does matter
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