Many websites currently seen on the Web are poorly designed; if not from a visual standpoint, then certainly from a technical one. Especially in the early days of the Web, before the widespread adoption of CSS, it was common for websites to be designed using a table-based layout. In fact, such designs are still common when What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editors are used to create webpages.

Table-based layouts may many times look the same as tableless layouts, but they have a number of significant problems. Table-based layouts use HTML <table> tags to create a page’s visual structure, whereas tableless layouts use CSS to create similar (or better) appearances without bloating the webpage with extra code. Because of this, table-based layouts tend to take up more bandwidth, slowing down the user’s experience while the page loads and also costing you more money if your web host charges you based on the amount of data that is served. Tableless designs are also more accessible for mobile devices, screen readers, and other media, while table-based websites may only work when viewed with a computer’s web browser. This enhanced accessibility may also boost your ranking in search engines.

This isn’t the only problem that older websites may suffer from. Also common are image-based layouts (often used at the same time as table-based layouts). By storing almost all content in images, image-based layouts have very long loading times, cannot be viewed in non-visual media, and suffer in search-engine rankings. Additionally, image-based layouts can be hard or impossible to edit, because changing their content may require editing images rather than simple text.

Veni Vortex can fix many such websites! There are two ways of doing so. One is to do a complete redesign, which is effectively the equivalent of creating a website from scratch and just copying the old content. See Design & Development for details about complete redesigns. Alternatively, we can keep the same overall look of your website and simply redesign the code to give it all the benefits of good, modern technologies. This way may result in minor visual changes, but the overall appearance should be mostly unchanged (although specifics may vary by website).

Either of these will make your website better in a number of ways. By getting rid of table-based and image-based designs, your website’s content will be more accessible, allowing vision-impaired users to more easily use your website. For the same reason, your search engine ranking may increase. By using modern web standards defined by the W3C, your website will be better prepared for the future of the Web, such as the semantic web. Additionally, your website will likely use less code than it used to, increasing the user’s perception of how fast the website is, and reducing hosting costs if your web host charges based on bandwidth used.