@TonyM 192326 wrote:
Hi
I have been told by a “professional” website designer that Google does not like tables and sites with css are much more likely to get a higher search ranking.
Is there any evidence of this or was he just trying to get some business by charging to convert a site from tables to css? (this was for a friend of mine’s site) – I am still using Dreamweaver 3 with tables.
Google does like crawling websites fast, that’s why your designer didn’t lie to you. With tables (usually loads of nested tables for the desired layout) spiders can have hard time to crawl deep your site because they need to go through loads of unnecessary code till they get to the main part: the content.
The more content is crawled the higher you might rank.
I have been using CSS/XHTML since 2004 in all our developments, and it’s a definite competitive edge over those websites that use tables for layout.
If you have experience html with tables I recommend buyin Sitepoint’s great book – Designing Without Tables Using CSS: http://www.sitepoint.com/books/css2/ I used it a lot when I learned CSS and it explains the box model (the fundamental of CSS layouts) in a very clear way (though a lot of things will change with CSS 3, it does worth to understand the basics).