Separating Design and Content
Audience: Small Business Owners
Purpose: To explain how to optimize your website for ease of maintenance and flexibility.
Author: Jonathan Bailey — © Bailey & Hall 2006 Article Date: 2006-09-14
Last Updated: 2007-02-27
Summary
One of the more important "movements" in the web development world (and if you're a developer reaching for your email client &mdash yes I know the idea has been around awhile, please consider the audience of this article) is the growing emphasis on the separation of design and content.
Very briefly this means making the content (words, pictures, etc) independent of its decoration (colors, fonts, positioning on the page, etc).
Why is this important?
This idea is important because it makes what you have to say — your content — essentially independent of the medium — or decoration. Take this article for example. Right now you are reading it on your web browser, but if you click on the print this page link at the top of any article you will receive the same content in a form appropriate for your printer. Tomorrow we might need a version for cellphones or some other device.
If the content and the design were "mixed" then these other uses of your content would be require a lot of work and more importantly lead to a duplication of the content itself. Right now I can change the words on the page in one place and the changes are reflected here and on the printable page. Otherwise I would have to remember to update both pages (or if the site were complex enough 100's of pages)
Thus this separation makes maintaining and extending your web site much simpler and quicker.
Also if changes need to be made to the design, such as changing the font size of the headers, then that change can be made in one place and one place only for the entire site.
Modifying the content itself becomes much simpler since most of the html code has been removed from around the core content, making it clearer for non-developers to work with.
Finally, building your web site this way can be a helpful for the visually impaired. Properly done, this technique allows them to change the way you have presented the content into a form they can more easily read.