I am interested to know what web designers that design many sites, and try to keep their costs down for the customers think.

I started out designing sites with html and tables for a while, then I found out more about the whole 'keeping information sepperate from design/layout' issue.

I know that web compliance says that using css to style the pages and html to input the information, but I find that getting the design to be cross browser flexible is quite a struggle, especially if you don't have access to each browser and each version, and there are many!

Also, upon a search, I found that the majority of web designers use tables to do the whole site, and just use css to 'finesse' the design. And these sites certainly don't get penalised by the search engines for not being 'web compliant'.

What I want is to design websites for customers who want a web presence without paying a lot, and for that website to be cross browser compliant without spending a lot of time on it. Time is money after all.

Thanks for any feedback.

CSS, if not carefully negotiated, will cause pages to break in different browsers. Unfortunately most designers optimise code specifically for IE, which isn't exactly the most "compliant" CSS standards browser around.

you can use css to make your page code shorter.... just make sure to test your page in different browser to check errors and bugs...

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^ i agree with bogs... in SEO, it is much better if you external your css for easier crawling of SE's spiders..

I think you are talking about layout. If you are then I think css layout is being popular now. You can create fast loading page using it.

Well, speaking as someone who designs sites for small businesses, on moderate budgets fairly often, for me at least CSS is a massive time saver over designing with tables.

The initial hump is the problem - getting it right the first few time. After that, you basically have a stock of layouts which just work, and which with little effort can be reused on sites that look completely different from each other just by altering a stylesheet.

The cross-browser issues can largely be addressed by keeping it simple - I don't use any hacks, just stick to what works on all browsers and degrades acceptably on very old ones. There is plenty of scope there without making life unnecessarily difficult or being unduly curtailed in what you can do.

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If you code using web standards, then generally speaking, there should be no fear of whether or not your site will look well on whatever browser.

Tables should be restricted to tabuluar data, that's it. Those who don't like using CSS or claim CSS "can be a struggle" don't understand and/or appreciate the power of the cascade. You make a change in one place and bingo! the change takes place everywhere.

If you must use tables, I would say, restrain it to your prototypes, where you just want to whip up something quick for the client's eyes. Once approved, divide the page into logical grids and CSS the thing. You will save not only in maintenance costs, but in SEO costs as well

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well u cant ask like HTML or CSS as it like this, "HTML and CSS" but are related.. CSS really helps when coding a large site... optimizes the coding effort and helps to reduce the load time..

but do careful some browser have issue with CSS evem some time IE also screw up..

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IE and other browsers may screw up but that is why you are supposed to test your code across all major browsers that your client is targetting. You can't just do "blind coding" and hope that everything will work its way across all browsers.

A wise man once told me: What is the difference b/w a master and an apprentice? The Master measures twice and cuts once, the apprentice does the exact opposite.

Folks, we bear the name "webmaster" for a reason. We should be disciplined enough to test all our code b4 we launch it.

'hope this helps.

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Personally, I like to use css for minimal purposes, and do the majority in html, however most of my websites are just tables with images in them since I design templates in photoshop. I wish everyone would just switch to firefox though.