5 Reasons Tables for Layouts are BAD! 1. Complicated & Difficult to maintain 2. Often slow to load 3. Tables can hurt search engine optimization 4. Tables don’t always print well 5. CSS redesigns are more efficient

Reason 1 Fact: Tables are Complicated & Difficult to maintain If it is not data that could be managed on a spreadsheet, images or graphs will be difficult to upkeep. Resource webdesign.about.com/od/layout/a/aa1111oza.htm

Table used for graph will be difficult to maintain.

Reason 2 Fact: Tables are often slow to load Resourcehttp://

Here, a screenshot of a of a site using tables to load images is taken before the images loaded.

Reason 3 Fact: Tables can hurt search engine optimization Data inside of tables can be considered less important than data of other sites. Reference extracting-table-data-on-the-web/

Information in tables will not be given priority by search engine spiders. html

Reason 4 Fact: Tables don’t always print well Tables can be too wide to print, to make tables print, browsers will cut tables off and print sections below. Reference a.htm

Reason 5 Fact: CSS redesigns are more efficient Redesigning a website using tables is significantly slower than redesigning a website using CSS. Reference superior-to-tables-in-website-design/

Example blogs/

One of NY Times worst rated sites

Summary There are better ways to layout images than tables, for example, CSS. CSS layouts for images will load faster. Less priority is given to data if it is inside a table. User experience may be poor if they find it difficult to print your information as it appears on page. When using external CSS style sheets, it is much easier to maintain visual consistency throughout a website.