Is table-less worthless?

[janeth]

Do you think Google cares about your bandwidth expenses and server load? Your costs?

I have my guys changing the site over now but I am willing to put money on the fact that my rankings will not improve nor will I save money on bandwidth.

[janeth]

According to others if I do a search on Google I should see nothing but W3C compliant and table-less designed websites. I have asked Maria to do some searching and post the information here on the forum when she finishes.

[kgun]

I have my guys changing the site over now but I am willing to put money on the fact that my rankings will not improve nor will I save money on bandwidth.

Then the project is misunderstood. Make a site with 100 000 pages.

1. Make it in pure HTML and use tables for design overall. How many Mb's will that site be?
2. Make the same site in CSS, with a single site-wide stylesheet that is loaded into memory once. Use <li> for links.
3. Compare results.

It is reckognized by most Web Masters that HTML was wrong from the very beginning, mixing content and styling. CSS driven sites separates content from presentation and it is much simpler to reuse.

P.S. Which site is easiest to update?

In the short run it may cost more (increased investments in human capital). In the long run it will save you money.

Learning:
Competence in short term memory are almost useless. Competence in long time memory is gold. Read, reread, repeat, repeat until the skills are drilled into long term memory.

I go for XML. In sum efficiency and minimalism.

Good news, I leave now. Bad news, I may return. It is weekend.

[janeth]

Then the project is misunderstood. Make a site with 100 000 pages.

1. Make it in pure HTML and use tables for design overall. How many Mb's will that site be?
2. Make the same site in CSS, with a single site-wide stylesheet that is loaded into memory once. Use <li> for links.
3. Compare results.

It is reckognized by most Web Masters that HTML was wrong from the very beginning, mixing content and styling. CSS driven sites separates content from presentation and it is much simpler to reuse.

P.S. Which site is easiest to update?

In the short run it may cost more (human capital costs). In the long run it will save you money.

Good news, I leave now. Bad news, I may return. It is weekend.

You are talking about design and I agree with that but this is in the search engine optimization forum.

If we are talking about design then it needs to be moved.

[weslinda]

SEO is not the only reason for tableless. There are other reasons. Including and not limited to:

1. Ability to reduce code on the page, allowing for improved page load times and server load and performance.
2. Ability to semantically layout your content to allow for easier interaction with various mediums including print, screen readers, mobile browsers and more.
3. Ability to easily update and change the visual appearance and layout of the site through a single file, allowing for much easier conversions of the site from a visual perspective.

These are just a few of the things that you can do when moving to CSS and Tableless designs. Of course, most people don't want to think through these types of benefits when developing a site. Everyone is much more concerned about the initial effort it will take to develop a quality site based on CSS and no tables, versus seeing what the long term benefit can be outside of the SEO positives.

I think that too many people want to be on the extremes of the discussion, either on the "it doesn't matter at all" side as you are Janeth, or the "tables are the devil" side from you Webnauts. I think that we need to realize that SEO isn't the only reason to change a site to tableless and there are numerous reasons and benefits to such an endeavor.

[MuNKyonline]

Then you are lucky that you have a department to go to. A lot of companies have no experience in building sites, and as such believe all the hype that goes around.

Development agencies exaggerate on times, especially when the companies have no idea on time ratios. For example: 11 days effort to build a contact us page at a cost of £7,150 + the technical spec £11k. Funny, this task would only take me about 1 hour effort. No wonder companies are looking to Eastern Europe to get their websites built.

In fact by rebuilding the site in full CSS from being tables will affect the SEO; as all the previous efforts of getting pages linked, will be broken as new page names will replace the old: creating dead-links.

I think you have exaggerated quite a lot here on the costs for developing a website in CSS compared to tables. I dont know of any companies anywhere that would charge something like that for one page lol. You must be looking in the wrong places if you're getting quotes like that!

Tables would take far longer to load, as BJ has pointed out, increasing the bandwidth usage.

If anything, I can create an accessible website in CSS/XHTML far more quickly than I could when I built websites in just tables controlled by CSS. So my labour expenses are less.

[Webnauts]

Then you delegate too little, Janeth.



Brandwidth (a new word in digital branding invented by WPW's Webnauts) or bandwidth?

It was a misspelling/mistyping error Kjell. I never have that problem when I am coding though! If I start posting such rude statements about someone misspelling of mistyping, and that person speaks 3 languages (Greek, English and German), I guess I will not be very welcome here anymore.

Should I start correcting you too buddy? No, no. I am far beyond that level.

[Webnauts]

I have my own server, so yes. And while I do not get as much traffic as Urbanxtremes I do get around 60k per month on one of my sites and have no problems with bandwidth at all.

I have a dedicated server in Germany, two shared servers in the US (one for "Round Robin DNS Balancing").

As I am concerned about my bandwidth and of the search engines too, my sites are table-less and additionally I use HTTP-Conditionals, as Google requires and as I explained previously in this thread.

[kgun]

John, it was a joke, funny misspelling.

If you should start to correct my English, you would have to have more than 24 hours a day and night.

I should have left long time ago.

P.S. Day and night="Døgn" in Norwegian. Any single English word for day and night?

[weslinda]

Isn't the ability to rearrange content within the code a benefit from an SEO standpoint? As you are able to move the most relevant content to the top of your code?