It’s shocked me to see the number of people still using tables to lay out their websites… Tables pose a problem for many reasons.
1. Website Speed
2. Cost
3. Compliance to ADA standards
WEBSITE SPEED
Why does speed play a part in this new world of 20mb internet speeds and fiber-optics infrastructure? Because not everyone has it! Websites still need to keep an eye on 56K dialup, as a majority of users have DSL+, there are a significant number of people who don’t have access to anything faster. Rural areas, which you might not consider too far off the beaten path, relay on glorified cell phone towers to get 128K speeds but it’s unreliable and works on direct line of site, leaving standard dial-up as the most viable alternative.
Google now takes your pages’ sizes and load times into consideration when placing you on the search results. And tables, great for tabular data is heavy on the code side, which increases the file size and load times. When designing a website each page needs to be below 150k before CSS, Images, and other attachments.
The speed is also affected by slicing your site into different images to be placed inside each cell. A browser will load one large image faster than 40 smaller images, and it loads all at once instead of populating one at a time making your site look like its having problems while it finishes the remaining images.
COST
You’ve defined the cell sizes, so when it’s loading your site isn’t jumping around like Richard Simons as it pulls in the files one-by-one, but lets talk cost. If your website has 50 pages, all built using your “template”
design, then what happens when you want to change your website using CSS? A simple update can be performed in one location, then tested and implemented in a matter of minutes. If you’re using tables, that same job just got amplified 50-times. When one simple change has to be manually pushed through each page again, one-by-one, that becomes costly and burdensome, and that’s when you begin to avoid changes. This, in turn, hurts your site’s ranking, which hurts your traffic, which hurts your sales… not a good thing.
Compliance
Any company with 15 or more employees is required by law to meet the ADA’s standards for website design, which means not using tables for website layout.
I took this quote from the government guidelines: “Large tables of data can be difficult to interpret if a person is using a non-visual means of accessing the web. Users of screen readers can easily get ‘lost’ inside a table because it may be impossible to associate a particular cell that a screen reader is reading with the corresponding column headings and row names.”
-http://www.access-board.gov/sec508/guide/1194.22.htm#%28a%29
What does this all mean for you? If you’re larger or smaller than 15 employees it’s in your best interest for all the reasons above to start removing tables from your site’s layout.
