Styling Content with and without CSS

[Dcrux]

To say Cascading Style Sheets are primitive is an insult to the stone age. In other words, CSS should become interesting about the time your grandkids are making sites using the CSS 7 standards.

In the meantime we have a couple of options.

Develop a theme
For example a consulting company created a magnificent Flash masthead on the theme of balance, never to mention that theme again in word or deed. When I mentioned they could describe their business practices around the idea of balance, even create value added services with it, they were astonished.

They had literally never thought to do such a thing. This reduced what could have been a coherent business identity to a logo, a color scheme, and a slogan which came off sounding like so much hyperbole. Forget sophisticated strategy, this makes sense simply on the basis of consistency in design ...and still it eluded them. Another company, in the web design field, used stock photograpy of a tree. Why? Why not. There was no attempt to associate the image with anything else on the site.

Separation of style from content indeed. When separation becomes disintegration the theme -- no matter how flawless the asthetic -- becomes "because we can." The tagline is separated from the text. The text is separate from images. Images don't really refer to anything much at all.

To establish a theme, have web site elements build upon eachother by refering to each other. Want balance as a theme, have your business consultancy talk about what's out of balance and how you restore it. Want to use a tree to represent your web design business? Fine ....then relate something about the tree to the web design business.

Forget branding. We're just talking about basic coherency of design here.

Develop a style

Copywriting is still the web’s biggest weakness … Who’s doing a great job of explaining their product or service? Who speaks like a human and not like a computer or a marketing machine?
-- 37Signals

Most people can use the term "content-driven," they just can not execute a content driven site. They start with a CMS package ...then figure out what to do with it. They style the navigation ....far before having anything to navigate to. The end result is a site with impeccable production values, great search engine positioning, but when you click there is no "there" there. No focus. No point of view. These sites all have one theme of purposelessness; content isn't a driver but an excuse for the technologies involved.

When you visit a site with a humanist writing style you immediately sense the mechanical style of most sites. Cornerhost and Tiny Screenfuls are commercial, yet accessible in a way those writing accessibility standards will never comprehend.

Content-driven sites are different. ...They're about content.

Everyone can create a content driven site. You just have to choose the skin, template or CMS features. No, wait ...that can't be right. Instead of redesigning try realigning.

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, July 22, 2001: Tagline Blues: What’s the Site About?The most popular web design themes are "me too" and because we can.

Developing your style (of writing)

Developing a Style Guide

Authentic Voice: Why does voice matter?

Tiny Screenfuls

[DrTandem1]

I read your post twice. I did not visit any of the links you supplied at the end of the post. Could you encapsulate what you are trying to say in a sentence or two? Are you trying to say that text is more important than graphics and layout?

[Faglork]

Basically, he talked about "coherence". Not beeing coherent is a major flaw with many websites.

One of his examples was using stock photos. In almost all cases, those "neat" photos are there because "they look good, don't they?" without any direct relation to the text. So the message of the photo and the message of the text do not enhance each other, they may even send contradicting messages.

The idea of a "theme" helps to keep and communicate this coherency.

Could I make it clear?

faglork

[Pahp]

Slow day on the forum? I'm astounded that this post was promoted via mailing list. I'm with Tandem in that I had to do a double take here - why was CSS even mentioned in the title? A more appropriate title would have been "Coherency of Design" and the irrelevant jab at CSS would have been better treated with the Delete key. (I find it interesting that A List Apart is later referred to)

[Dcrux]

The idea that style resides in a control file is an interesting concept with ramifications underlying the post kicking off this thread. The doubletake is fairly understandable from the atomistic view, and is similar to the doubletake I do about every fifth thread about software or code in a content forum.

One of the links in the kickoff post is an article entitled The Content Conundrum. It sounds like it might be about content, but it's really about a control file.

It may seem like content should come first—that the content should be the driving force behind the project. But in the university web site setting, I am finding that the motivation for these redesigns is often not content-driven.
-- The Content Conundrum

Well, okay ....why? Could it be we've lost the forest for the trees. If so, what is the underlying cause? One of the concepts is that Flash tends to attract a certain developer ...who thinks about sites in a certain way. Could be CSS does the same thing. I can't, for example set the image attribute to that of famous photographer Ansel Adams. Nor can text be set to the style of a Mark Twain, or anyone for that matter. Perhaps a little too much ambition to call it a style sheet, an attribute not unknown in the tech field.

Often the layout and technical choices made will constrain other design decisions. Not "bad" or "good" these influences should be something to be aware of. And if the "style" does not reside in a control file with a particular extension, the question then turns to what will constrain, or change style?

Flash is just a program. CSS is just a file. But the humans who use them do tend towards certain ideas and not others. CSS Zen Garden is an amazing accomplishment, but it is a little one dimensional. If the Flash people did this, it might be called something quite unkind.

And there seems to be a dearth of alternative opinion or tools. Now there's Flash, but also AJAX. Strangely enough, the AJAX target seems more concerned with end use, even though it could have gone another way. There's an interplay between use and application here -- can't blame the user or the tool in isolation.

Could be CSS in a Content Discussion forum is going to be from a different perspective. A perspective quite different from a structure/code driven approach. That doesn't make it irrelevant or wrong (or right) -- just different.

Could be that isn't a bad thing.

[promarkweb]

Okay...i read this a few times, and I guess I'll take a shot at this. Hope I come across positively.

First, while I agree there are some limitations to CSS. I think that proper practice allows the design of a very solid site, and a site that functions across various mediums. In a new design I'm working on currently, it has changed the site speed, and "look" to a great result.

Second, I thought the whole point of a website was to get your message out. Sell a product, solution, answer, experience, or whatever you might be in the business of promoting. Call me old fashion, but I think that the web world is one that should take the content, and drive the site and navigation with the content, while leaving room for added content and information.

I think that we've missed the fact that some sites, flash, css or html are designed by random people, for random reasons. You've got a medium that allows someone with $10 and a dream the ability to promote whatever they want. So, you get various thoughts for design and content and the mixture.

Every day I see numerous requests for a new site with flash and a flash logo and neat wizbang flash introductions. All for a company promoting telephone systems to businesses.

We've escaped to this world of wizbang, without focusing on the need for relevancy. Who cares if the "Get A Quote" button stands out too much, if it doubles your contact form submission rate? Make it pink with elephants in the background if I can double the number of leads we are getting doing it.

I've noticed that so many people talk about flash, or css, or seo, or sem in their own special piece of the world, like they reside alone. All of these things are a part of the greater cause of sell my product. And as designers, we should be thinking like business partners, and not hopeful future award winners. Hence the reason I have redone a site based on some reviews here. (Which can be seen in the submit your site category under, ruggedlaptops.us)

3. From a style and content mix, I definately think we should be helping our clients build web sites that meet their customers needs. That's it, plain and simple, and nothing more, and nothing less. If Flash is needed great, if not, don't use it. If Javascript is needed, great, if not, don't use it. Simple design, quality message, engage the visitor. That's what we are all shooting for isn't it?

Enough of my rant, everyone have a great day and lets all go out and od on flash! Yeah!!!!!!

[IIxxVADERxxII]

I simply perfer editing w/out css.

XHTML
+
CSS =

: )

[Dcrux]

And as designers, we should be thinking like business partners, and not hopeful future award winners. Hence the reason I have redone a site based on some reviews here. (Which can be seen in the submit your site category under, ruggedlaptops.us)

Very good post. In this example, we talked about an application list for different categories of "ruggedness."

What say I point to a CSS/tables application chart using zebra-shading for readability.

I see a lot of pink elephant backgrounds, but few pink elephant tests resulting in a case history about some goal and some result. I don't see, for example, direct response CSS tips, or readability CSS tips, just an obscure reference two levels deep.

[tony]

What's the purpose?
Web design and content have to go hand in hand.
Otherwise it's just a cheap commercial for another meaningless piece of crap which has no use.

There will always be bad websites. The only thing you can do is use the ones you like and pass the ones you don't.

Maybe we should wait to see if internet2 gets it right...(that's a joke, son).

[Dcrux]

Seven years after the first American Web site launched, Jeffrey Zeldman and a group of fellow Web developers decided that Microsoft and Netscape were fragmenting the Web into proprietary fiefdoms, with the side effect of forcing developers to code duplicate versions of their sites for a metastasizing population of incompatible browsers.
-- A Web gadfly makes his mark

I bet -- were I to do all table-based layouts -- the opinion of the only thing you can do might be different. Were this a code discussion, any number of designers would feel quite free to hold forth on why I'm either behind the times, or worse. The same goes for blink tags in a usability forum.

WPW itself took the step of having a content discussion forum.

There's really no reason not to adopt content-driven websites as thoroughly as standards. Where reasonable arguments are put forth against tables, something similar can be said about pointless content and purposeless designs and redesigns. ALA did this with the "redesign versus realign" article referenced here.

Content driven design gives the designer just as many advantages and opportunities for differentiation as standards based design. And, like standards, it is something we should have been doing anyway.

What Zeldman did was show standards aren't limiting, they free up your time for innovation. What CSS Zen garden did for CSS was destroy the myth CSS couldn't do anything. They didn't go nearly far enough, but these examples show the way. The point is to see the differences and advantages of content-driven design.