If you're a Web designer, you've probably heard the term "tableless layout" thrown around here and there. Basically it means creating a pure CSS document without one single table.

If you're new to NEATO/Joomla and you've opened up some of the default templates that comes with the basic installation into Dreamweaver - you've probably felt your heart skip a beat while watching Dreamweaver display something that you can't even recognize as a Web site.

While those who exclusively produce pure CSS pages will tell you they're smaller in file size and therefore faster for the end-user to download - we've found time and time again that it takes 20 times longer to develop a pure CSS page, and on average we've shaved off anywhere between 2 to 4k.

That's it? A much longer development time to shave a few k off the file size?


For those of you who are new the the world of content management systems, let us tell you what we do here in order to produce pages which our CMS uses...

All of the Web site designs created here at Studio4Squared are first produced in Photoshop (at 72DPI at 100% of actual size). Once the designs are approved, we slice up the files and reconstruct the page into HTML via Dreamweaver. Does this sound familiar to those of you who've been developing "static" Web pages up to this point? It should since we're almost doing the exact same thing you're doing.


To create a page in Dreamweaver that will operate as a NEATO/Joomla template - very little is done differently from what you've done in the past with "static" pages. In fact, instead of coding out an entire site in Dreamweaver - you would typically only have to create two to three pages (then let the CMS build the site for you).


For the CSS purists who are probably cringing while reading this, please keep in mind that while we do continue to employ the services of tables within our Web site designs, we do use CSS quite extensively throughout our templates as well. But when your main HTML building tool is Dreamweaver, you need to be able to see what you're working on - and tables provide that basic foundation to work from (and take just a few seconds to set-up exactly the way you want them to be).


So by ignoring this recent trend of creating pure CSS tabless layouts, are we doing anything wrong? Not at all. And while our pages may end up being 2 to 4k larger in file size, we can create them from scratch extremely quickly.

When you have a house built from from the ground up - do you ask the carpenter what tools were used to build the house? Of course not. As the client, you're only concerned with how well the house will work for you.