CSS has reaffirmed its position in the world of Web design. Over the past few years there have been several developments pertaining to CSS that have completely changed our outlook of CSS. The fact of the matter is that it is now possible to create amazing animations and stunning image effects using CSS. This can easily be verified by talking some time to surf the World Wide Web and examine websites that are already doing this.

Making use of CSS doesn’t have to be restricted to the experts who have years had years of experience. The reason being that it is not that hard to learn and further more is easy to implement. However before take the leap that will change your web designing experience for ever it may be a good idea to keep in mind that it is good to have visually stunning CSS effects of all kinds, however what is more important is to do it such that the performance of the website is not affected. A website does needs to be appealing but not at the cost of its performance. Here are a few tips to help you get started:

Keeping only Code that is in use:

It often happens that a lot of the CSS that is present in that Style Sheet file of yours is not actually being utilized. This can happen due to a number of reasons.

For example while making our designs, converting it from a mock-up in PSD (for example) to HTML we may introduce several elements that by the time the design is done are not implemented. Additionally it is also possible during the maintenance of a website several CSS classes and elements are sized to be useful and hence now unused but still exist in our Style Sheet file.

Thus in between designing those fancy and stunning CSS effects if you spend some time removing unused CSS code, the website is likely to respond and perform better.

Now here comes the good part. You do not have to manually go through your website with a fine tooth comb. There is a tool available that can do this for you. This tool is called “UnCSS” and if provided the list of HTML and CSS files it will generate the CSS file which is highly optimised and basically contains only code that is in use.

Duplicate CSS

The issue of duplicate CSS is pretty real and can hurt your website. The duplicate CSS is also a bi-product of the designing and maintenance process. Thus it is necessary to check those Style sheet files of yours to remove such duplicated CSS code. But you are in luck again since there is an efficient tool for this as well which is called “csscss”. This is capable of checking for redundant CSS elements and help removing them.

Optimizing the CSS

Once you are sure you neither have duplicate CSS code nor unused CSS code it is time to optimize the CSS code that you have written. You will be surprised how useful this exercise can be.

A quick example will help understand why this is important. Imagine writing a 2 to 3 page article for a newspaper and publishing it without first reviewing it. No matter how good a writer you are, it is never a good idea to publish anything without first reviewing it.

The same thing applies to your Style Sheet file as well. The process of designing a straight forward layout is not that hard and will probably not need optimizing. On the other hand when you get down to creating the fancy elements using CSS it is highly likely that you will achieve the final desired result at the cost of some bad CSS code selections. This is forgivable as long as you take time to analyze and identify such code to make sure that the CSS that ends up on the main project is of good quality.

Fancy yet efficient websites with Alakmalak:

Alakmalak has been in to Web development since a very long time. They have developed more than 2000 websites for client from all around the globe. The fact is that there was a time when Flash was very popular and most of the fancy designs were done with flash. Those days are now gone with increasing dependency on the new HTML5 and CSS3 features.

Having witnessed this change over the years and by staying well ahead of the trends Alakmalak has managed to perfect the skill of designing complicated layouts using fast and efficient CSS code, no matter what the design or CSS requirements may be.

Thus this is one web design firm & web development firm, you can trust when it comes to the design and development of your website.

• Efficiently Rendering CSS
• Using CSS code smartly to build an efficient and fast website