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One of the ironic things about the modern age of communication that we live in is that no matter how much information there is out there on the Net about other parts of the world so many people stay focused on their own little area.

Back in our great-grandparents day the area they heard the most about was within a 20 mile radius of their town. Today we get information from all over the world delivered to our desktops within minutes of an event happening and so many of us are still not 'seeing' what's happening beyond that 20 mile radius.

Right now where I live tens of thousands of people are on cyclone watch, people living in low-lying areas are going to start evacuating this morning and it's news all over Australia. Yet just last night a friend who lives in another state and who stays glued to his computer had no idea that we were facing the imminent threat of a tropical cyclone.

But it gets worse than that. I know people right here in town who watch the television, have the radio turned on every waking moment of the day and yet somehow they too missed the hourly bulletins and the warnings that are being broadcast. Sometimes you just have to wonder what you have to do to get the message across!

Over the weekend we made our plans for staying or evacuating and decided on the criteria that needed to be met before we did evacuate; we bought in extra supplies and stocked up on batteries. And after that was all done we got back to work.

For Steve that work involved trying to turn a site template into something that would actually do all the things we wanted it to do once the site goes live and therein is a lesson for everyone who designs sites for the adult market.

Instead of designing the template in CSS as we had asked, the designer produced it in an awful mess of CSS and tables so it's really not one thing or the other and converting it to either pure CSS or a layout based on tables just isn't in our timeframe.

Because of the coming storm and some deadlines we thought we could meet we have to be able to work fast and that's the way you need to be able to work in adult. Instead of messing about trying to line up images and the bottom of tables you need to be able to do it right the very first time. You also need to be able to cope with all the different ways that the major browsers deal with CSS and sometimes that can be a very time-consuming exercise.

Of course those people who are CSS sycophants will tell you that tables were designed to present data while CSS is all about the content. They'll also tell you that CSS is good for search engine optimization ... it's good for speeding up the load time for a site and it whitens your teeth and washes your car at the same time ... but sometimes I think those guys are just so off with the fairies that they've lost touch with reality.

Sure tables were designed to present data on the Net but for years designers have been designing intricate websites using tables ... and most of that was back in the era where we really did need to build fast-loading sites. Hell tables worked very well back in the days of 28.8 and 33.3kbs download speeds so why are they suddenly such a drag on download time now? Of course they're not!

What about tables and search engine optimization? Well the CSS people will tell you that the ratio of code to content is less in a CSS site than it is in a site built with tables and that means that a CSS site will rank better than a site built with tables. But is that really the case or is that just some propaganda someone thought up without actually checking?

If the ratio of code to content really is that important then maybe you should stick to building sites in tables because I've seen plenty of code-heavy sites that have been built using CSS and I've seen some very code-light sites built using tables. I've also seen plenty of table-built sites outranking CSS sites in the search engine results pages.

And if you think that CSS sites load faster than a well-designed site based on tables then you really need to go back to the very basics and start all over again. The same goes for the way sites appear in the various browsers. You have more chance of obtaining a uniform appearance across all the major browsers if you use tables than if you use CSS.

About now the CSS team will try to tell you that if you use tables then you must use spacer gifs too and they are just such a waste of space. Well guess what, Steve has never used a spacer gif in his life and maybe you should check all those CSS sites and see how many spacer gifs those guys use.

Now I'm not suggesting that CSS should have absolutely no part in the design of an adult site. Setting up the parameters for your fonts, links and text size in one place can be very handy but for us here in adult that's about the limit. Very few of us ever need to change anything in a free site or gallery once it's built so the ability to effect change across a large number of pages with just one alteration to a style sheet isn't important in adult.

So if you're new here and you're thinking that you need to learn all you can about style sheets before you can actually build a site then don't panic. Tables still work quite well and they'll go on working well for many years to come.