Datasheet

16
Part I: Creating Great Web Sites
 Web sites designed in CSS are accessible to more visitors. When Web
designers talk about accessibility, they mean creating a site that can be
accessed by anyone who might ever visit your pages — that includes
people with limited vision who use special browsers (often called screen
readers) that read Web pages aloud, as well as many others who use spe-
cialized browsers for a variety of other reasons.
If you work for a university, a nonprofit, a government agency, or a simi-
lar organization, you may be required to create accessible designs. Even
if you’re not required to use CSS or to design for accessibility, it’s still
good practice. That’s why Dreamweaver includes so many CSS features
and a collection of predesigned CSS layouts like the one I used to create
the site design shown in Figure 1-2. You find instructions for creating
CSS layouts like this one in Chapter 6.
Reviewing old-school designs
Although CSS is by far the best option for creating Web designs today, many
sites on the Web were created with tables to control the layout, like the one
shown in Figure 1-3. Old-school sites like this one were created with the
HTML table tag. To help you appreciate how this page was created, I altered
the original design to display the table borders, although most designers turn
off table borders when using Tables to create layouts like this.
Figure 1-2:
This site
was
designed
with one
of Dream-
weaver’s
CSS layouts.
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