Is there a business reason for striving for pure CSS layout?

Question

It seems like every time I try to create a pure CSS layout it takes me much longer than if I\'d use a table or two. Getting three columns to be equal lengths with different amou

Answer 1

If you have a public facing website, the real business case is SEO.

Accessibility is important and maintaining semantic (X)HTML is much easier than maintaining table layouts, but that #1 spot on Google will bring home the bacon.

For example: Monthly web report: 127 million page views for July

Monthly web report: 127 million page views for July

...

Latimes.com keeps getting better at SEO (search engine optimization), which means our stories are ranking higher in Google and other search engines. We are also performing better on sites like Digg.com. All that adds up to more exposure and more readership than ever before.

If you look at their site, they've got a pretty decent CSS layout going.

Generally, you find relatively few table layouts performing well in the SERPs these days.