I want to take this opportunity to wish you a very Merry Christmas, and a successful, happy, and blessed New Year!

Thank you all so much for your business, support and attention over the past year. We have accomplished much, thanks to our clients!

I also want to let everyone know that I will be off-line from Friday, December 22 until Tuesday, January 2nd. Spending some quality time with friends and family, and particularly enjoying the undivided attention of my daughter. This is truly what Christmas is all about!

This article highlights the importance of proper back-end coding and the use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for the layout of a website.

Often clients and potential clients come to me with questions about why their site isn't performing as well as expected, both in site performance and in search engine rankings.

While much of this depends upon how a site is designed, a very large contributing factor is in how the site is actually coded. The use of automated code generators, and certain website editors, make a major difference here. Automated code is typically very bulky, and creates large amounts of unnecessary code, making for a very inefficient website. Also, using tables for visual layout causes a lot of problems in search engine spidering.

In order for a site to perform at peak efficiency, to be highly accessible to search engines and to give those search engine spiders the proper information in the correct order, as well as for general accessibility, the code needs to be written in the proper format. Also, the use of CSS to generate the desired layout and visual representation plays a huge role here.

Please take a look at the new article for more information on what the benefits of a site re-write using CSS are, how it works and what it does for your website.

Taking web standards into account when designing a website may not be a primary concern for many site owners, but when it comes to finding an extra edge to improve their business, they are more than willing to do anything required to increase revenues. Let's see how complying with Web standards can help a business website.

What are the Standards? On the Web, the main standards are the languages used when creating websites. The most wide-spread ones are HTML, XHTML and CSS. HTML or XHTML are used to create the backbone of websites - the structure. (The difference between HTML and XHTML is that XHTML was formed from XML and is forward compatible.) CSS, in turn, is used to style, format and position the structure and content.

What is Web Standards Compliance? Put simply, web standards compliance is using web languages correctly. This involves using HTML tags properly and the way they were and are intended to be used. For instance, one of the most common felonies against the web standards is using table tags for layout, while the correct usage is to use them only for tabular data (information to be put in tables).