I had a client contact me the other day asking to help optimize his site. The word optimize is something I think about a lot. What does it mean really? I would say it means a lot of different things to many different people. Probably easier to start with what is not optimized. I would say its important to have your code as lean as possible. This means externally mapped CSS and for the love of all that is holy - no tables!
I looked at my potential clients current site and what did I see? Tables inside of tables that are surrounded by ... tables. So much HTML. Why are they bad? Let's do a comparison.
<table>
<tr>
<td>I'm surrounded by code!!!</td>
</tr>
</table>
Look at all that! That's so ugly. We also get very little control on how that's displayed. It's a mess. Let's see how that works with CSS.
<div id="content">I'm lite weight!</div>
A lot cleaner. If you are using tables, stop. Soon HTML 5 will be here and we'll have even more control. HTML 5 will be a blessing for those interested in SEO. The code will literally tell the search engines what each part is. Giving them accurate readable labels that they understand. We'll go over in detail in the future. Just for now, if you are using tables please learn CSS.
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