If you’re a small business owner who wants a website (or already has one and wants a few tips), I’d like to give you a little advice if I may. When you’re looking for a website designer, ask her if she uses CSS. In fact, you could go one better and ask her if she's a CSS expert.

I bet you want to know why you should ask that question.

But first, a little about what CSS is. It stands for cascading style sheet and it’s a way to separate the code for the content of your site from its design. Used properly, CSS dictates your websites colors, placement of photos and text areas, font sizes and colors, etc., etc.

And now, let me tell you a bit about the CSS advantage.

1. Easier and faster design changes. Without CSS, any change you want to make has to be made on ALL your pages, but a CSS site means you can change all those same pages inside one document – your cascading style sheet.
2. Reduced page size. Because all your design and style information is in your style sheet, you’ll have smaller html pages, and that means…
3. Faster load time. If your site takes more than 7 seconds to load, chances are you’ll lose your visitor, and he might never be back!
4. Better search engine visibility. Navigation is usually listed at the top of an html page, but CSS allows you to have your content at the top instead, so the search engines will get at the important stuff first. And because there’s less code, the search engines have an easier time “reading” your site.
5. Professionalism. Your websites layout will be identical from page to page.
6. CSS allows you to do more with you site as it has more attributes than html alone.
7. Flexibility. You can define how a site will look for different media. For example, you can have separate styles for an average computer monitor and for hand-held devices.

Are you taking advantage of the benefits of CSS?

If your website isn’t a CSS site, you may be missing out on that edge that sometimes means a big difference. Right now, there are many, many sites on the web that do NOT use CSS. Or if they do, they use very little of it.

CSS has been around a few years, but not nearly as long as HTML has. Why not get a jump on your competitors? Be one of the first to use CSS for your website design. You’ll be glad you did.

One last word of caution—there are lots of web designers who claim to know and use CSS who are either not using it well, or not using it to its full potential. Make sure your website designer is a CSS expert.