Perhaps the older I get the more mellow I become because today I want to talk about CSS. Now for those of you who have the time to look back through the archives here there's a very good chance that you will come across a number of my columns where I really dissed CSS and those who said we should be using it.

Now ... I don't retreat from what I said back then because it was true. Back then there were lots of people who were claiming that CSS would do everything from curing the common cold to ensuring that you got great placement in the search engines for every possible search term you could imagine ... whether they were included on your web page or not.

At the same time as they were claiming that CSS had magical powers they were also claiming that anyone who still designed web pages using tables was deluded ... lacking in imagination and probably more than a little inbred and almost certainly couldn't achieve good search engine rankings. Of course that was just hype and when confronted with many websites built using tables that held down the top spot for many competitive terms those CSS evangelists became somewhat lost for words.

But times change ... the world moves on ... and now my business is turning out websites for clients that have nary a table in them. Well that's not 100 per cent accurate ... we did build a site recently for a client that included a table on one page of the site but that was to hold a bunch of data and even the most rabid CSS evangelists say that tables are ok if they're used to hold dates and figures and times.

But I'm not here today to sing the praises of CSS over tables ... what I want to offer you today are a couple instances of CSS properties that can be quite useful but you may not have encountered before.

White-space
If you were around in the bad old days of tables and you needed some white space in your text blocks then you would probably have used a bunch of non-breaking spaces to achieve what you wanted. You certainly couldn't include a number of empty spaces simply by hitting the space bar because the browser would laugh at you and collapse all that empty space into one single space.

But now there is a CSS property that allows you to include white space anywhere you want it. Rather than how to use the white-space property here let me suggest that you do a search for the property ... or find a good set of CSS tutorials ... and discover what a very useful little property white-space can be.

Speech bubbles
Now sometimes in our marketing speech bubbles can be quite useful but most of the speech bubbles that you may see are images and that's a problem if you want the text that appears in a speech bubble to count towards your search engine placement ... you know ... you want to use keywords that the search engines can actually read in those bubbles.

In the past you could have also cobbled together something similar using Javascript but then we all know that a lot of traffic sources that we might rely on here in adult have a thing about Javascript.

But all is not lost because it seems that you can create speech bubbles using CSS and if you head over to nicholasgallagher.com ... click the 'design' link at the top and then scroll down till you find “Progressive enhancement: pure CSS speech bubbles” ... you will discover how to do it.

And that's just two examples of things that CSS can do for you that you won't find in any basic CSS book or set of tutorials. There are plenty more of them out there just waiting for you to discover all by yourself so don't be satisfied with using CSS just for the basics.

Look beyond the basics and see what things you can do to enhance your websites and make them even more eye-catching and appealing to the people who visit them and who may want to spend money on the things that you're selling.

Sometimes it can be something as different as a text bubble that will mean the difference between having a web page that produces average sales and one that produces good sales. Sometimes all you need to do is have something that stands out from what surfers see everywhere else to outsell your competition.

And now I'm off to sit down with Steve and try and come up with a killer design for a website that offers a service for something that most of us would rather not think about. It's going to be a challenge ... especially considering that right now my brain is mush and Steve is still in your basic pre-coffee state.

08/30/2010 - Pushing Through

08/25/2010 - What Makes Content Unique?

08/23/2010 - Thinking – a Dangerous Pastime

08/18/2010 - Interesting Online Marketing Data

08/11/2010 - Web Design and Credit Cards

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