Tables and Tableless: Why you don’t want tables in your osCommerce site.
The debate between tableless and table-based designs usually take place in the dark, smoke-filled virtual rooms of design and marketing forums and rarely make it out into the open as anything more than one obscure item on a list of features for certain applications. The question, “is tableless better?” is not even asked, anymore from anyone seriously in the field of design and marketing. The answer, “yes, it is a lot better” has been proven time and time again.
Tableless Structure in design is better for marketing, SEO, file size and styling. It’s cheaper to maintain by designers that got past their first HTML tutorial before hiring themselves out and sites designed tableless have a much faster turn-around time.
The performance of our Tableless XHTML/CSS osCommerce demo store shows the power of this type of web site as it relates to Google and this is the number one reason why the tableless mark-up was considered the main component of our rewrite of that application.
Some designers (the ones least comfortable with CSS) will claim that nested DIV tags aren’t a real improvement to nested Tables and will point to sites such as CSS Zen Garden as a prime example of nested DIV’s. The argument is that the amount of code is often similar when DIV tags are endlessly nested. This misses the point of CSS Zen Garden, which was using that particular mark-up to be more flexible to ALL designers and not reduce file sizes or redundant coding… a point it makes clearly on the site. Further, the designers don’t suggest how they would be able to achieve such a vast array of designs from a single chunk of XHTML using only tables.
Where all else is the same and the number of incoming links are the same, tableless sites consistently out-perform tabled sites in everything from seo, w3 specs, load times, search engine rankings and file sizes.
The cost and time to make a design change with a single CSS file is reduced sharply compared to changes in tables across every document of a site. I’m able to produce a CSS osCommerce site in 7 – 10 days as compared to the 21 – 42 days for an osCommerce classic site. At $30 per hour, that translates into a huge savings.
Server performance is another issue with, for exmple, osCommerce MS2. Most osCommerce designers use a template system to design their osCommerce site and this increases the load on the server significantly, slowing the site down during peak hours for visitors. The alternative is STS or some other template is to code the PHP directly and that involves wading through thousands of lines of code across hundreds of documents. Tableless CSS osCommerce has the structure grouped together on a few pages and the design — using CSS — is located on ONE page.
No templates needed. Server gets to breathe a sigh of relief.
The newest applications and blog software use tableless mark-up for one real reason: It’s better.