A Question of Style

Since we've switched over to the new Plone web software, we (the web gnomes down in the Data Mines) have received several questions and requests regarding the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and similar tools to customize the appearance of parts of our website.

On the old web server, we used much simpler technology, which permitted anyone to do pretty much whatever they wanted. The result was a mess: everything looked different, nothing looked like it was part of any unified whole, navigation was inconsistent, and usability and accessibility were generally poor.

On the new server, we have the tools to avoid such problems: navigation is maintained separately from individual page content, usability and accessibility are much improved, and a consistent appearance can be imposed on old content through the extensive use of site-wide CSS.

There is, of course, a trade-off: because Plone was designed to impose consistent design rules, bypassing those rules requires extra steps. We've found situations where this was necessary and justified, and have worked out several methods to "fix" such problems.

However, in order to keep us from going back to the old, anything-goes situation we had before, we haven't put those tools into the hands of our site's users. We've passed on a few tips on how to control the appearance of content within the user-managed part of the page, but not the tools to, say, replace the top-left RCC logo.

We made the decision to not offer extensive styling capabilities (CSS and template overrides) to site users at this time for several reasons:

• This is RCC's website, and its primary purpose is to act as our "front door" on the Internet.
• Consistency of appearance, navigation, and accessibility are important qualities, from the point of view of our site's intended audience: the general public.
• We are interested in allowing enough user control to permit creative expression, but that's not the primary purpose of our site, and must therefore be a secondary goal.

Now, some people might reply, "Fine, but your current site design is plain / boring / ugly and I want my content to be better than that." Well, we haven't done any major site-wide customization yet, but we do intend to.

We have been discussing what changes to make, and (specific, helpful) suggestions are welcome. But, at the point where we do choose a new design, Plone will allow us to impose that design site-wide with just a little centralized tweaking. However, every style exception and work-around on our site will then need to be reviewed and adjusted to fix whatever breaks, so the fewer of those, the better.

This leads us to a recommendation which probably contradicts what you've heard elsewhere: Please make your content as plain as possible! Use structural markup appropriately (like H2 tags for subheadings), but leave the font and color decisions to us!

Yes, your pages will look plain (at least for now). But, as Google's own website has demonstrated, plain pages can be a very good thing, and they're much easier to create and maintain, too.

And, when our "new look" is implemented, you won't need to re-edit your pages to match.