Web Design Standards
Does your website conform to current design standards? Find out by going to the W3C Validator and plugging in your website URL. Don't be surprised if it fails validation. Most sites do. The fact that a site fails to validate doesn't mean that it doesn't work. At least not yet. Over time newer browsers will discontinue support of non-compliant features, which means that at some point some of the features of your site will no longer work.
Speaking of compliancy and web browsers, Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) is the worst violator of web standards available. Microsoft wants to corner the market so it uses proprietary standards that only IE supports. This means that sites designed for IE may not work the same way with other browsers, and visa versa. It makes web design more difficult that it should be.
Speaking of browsers, if you are not using Firefox, you are missing out on a host of browser improvements and features, many of which are simply not available with IE. Microsoft's impending release of IE 7.0 will provide an improvement, but will still fail to conform to many web standards.
Cascading Style Sheets
CSS provides for the separation of design from content. The reason for this development is to make your website design available to a variety of display devices — cell phones, PDAs, printers, etc. Viewing a website on a cell phone requires that the information be in a somewhat different format. The solution is to separate layout from content so that the same content can be presented in different ways for different display devices. It also makes design updates much easier.
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