5 Comments on “How do i convert an existing table layout to CSS?”

1. Sean Gillespie
   July 18th, 2007 at 2:00 pm

   I dont know of any software, but you could try using Find/Replace in notepad to find certain “strings” and replacing them with what you need.

   It what I normally do to add HTML properties to multiple tags at once.

2. Trev
   July 20th, 2007 at 4:57 am

   Using Dreamweaver, go to
   MODIFY >> CONVERT… >>Tables to AP Divs

   As regards SEO, there should be no problems anyway unless the tables are nested within each other, more than 3 deep.

   And this Table Trickl is worth a look for SEO purposes:

   N.B. Tables are valid CSS, see he specs., and prob. always will be.

3. Sunny
   July 21st, 2007 at 9:57 am

   Alrighty! The objective of converting a table layout into CSS is to reduce the volume of code in the website which makes search engine bots to crawl through the page easily and completely. This will enable Search Engine bots to crawl the content and understand the relevance of the content to the targeted keyword.

   Hence using a software for CSS conversion is not advisable and hand written codes are SEO friendly. I’ve had good success rate with the websites I coded with CSS. I’ve been a SEO specialist for 6 years now and I run web based IT firm: Go through the website and contact me if you need help.

   Thanks
   Sunny

4. ryan n
   July 24th, 2007 at 8:09 pm

   I applaud you for converting your site from table based layout to css, and I agree you don’t want machine generated code in order to improve seo.

   If you have time, you should look in to semantic html. It’s a coding style/philosophy where you make your html markup as meaningful and reusable as possible. You don’t pollute your code with meaningless markup to use only for hooks.

   Also consider accessibility. For instance, would your html be meaningful to a blind person that uses a screen reader to explore your site.

   Is you presentation (css), and behavior (javascript) seperated out from you mark up.

   Usually, if you consider all these things, and make your code as meaningful as possible, the seo part is well on it’s way already.

   Anyway, hope this is interesting to you, and good luck with your conversion.

   Here is a pretty cool site to check out:

5. mindmaker7
   July 25th, 2007 at 1:43 pm

   Ok, very simply:

   Basically, you will be doing the layout in html, and controlling the styles using CSS.

   You need to learn about the box model, which uses floating divs instead of tables. If you can already do HTML with tables, you can learn this in a day or two.

   eg,

   content for header goes here

   left goes here

   content goes here

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