On a personal note, I have been ultra-busy with moving and two big new projects that fell in my lap. As you probably noticed, I didn’t even follow my own advice from my blog post Relentless Blogging. Just think, how did you feel about this blog when I didn’t post for three weeks? That’s what happens when you fail to blog relentlessly.

Anyway, the two big new projects are both website design and implementation projects. I have been using tableless designs, and I have learned some things that I would like to pass on.

Design Power

I have designed websites for 7 years using frames, tables, and now divs with CSS. Frames are hated by users, search engines, and scripts. Tables result in bloated web sites that are hard to change with code that is even harder to understand. Tableless design allows me to place elements rigidly, relatively, or fluidly anywhere on the page that I want. Because design without complex tables is easier to understand, my creativity is unlocked.

Flexibility

The main power of tableless design is its flexibility. Changes are so much easier to make than they are with tables. Page design and formatting is almost always located in one Cascading Style Sheet file - so I can completely redesign my web site by editing one file. I don’t have to figure out which columns and rows to eliminate from or add to a table.

Search Engines Love It

Tables are complex, especially nested tables. Browsers and search spiders have to wade through table, row, and cell tags - several layers deep. Tableless design is clean and not nearly so nested. It’s easier for search spiders to find what they are looking for (content!) in a tableless design. Even if you ignore the design power and flexibility of tableless design, the potential to improve search rankings simply by making your page easier for spiders to crawl is enough reason to switch to tableless design.