No industrial marketing manager likes their Web site do they? No matter who you are you have some complaints; ‘it’s a bit clunky’, ‘it’s outdated’, ‘the content is a bit old hat’; you name the compliant I’ve heard it.

However, the answer to these problems is all too often to just take the site down and re-build it entirely. The trouble is this can result in all your valuable internal links, tagging and carefully developed inbound links being lost in the process.

Most often the approach is to, very carefully, choose which content needs to be retained on every single page of your, inevitably, enormous Web site. You also have to carefully catalogue every single inbound link and the landing page it goes to before ensuring that these too are carried across to the new site. This normally takes so long that you don’t bother.

However, there is another way, which is to retain the code and build a new CSS. This doesn’t work for every site but is well worth investigating.

I don’t mention this because it’s a new idea but because a brilliant illustration of how well it works was demonstrated to me recently. CSS Zen Garden demonstrates how CSS allows complete and total control over the style of a hypertext document. Visit the site and click on any of the links on the left hand side of the homepage and the appearance of the page you are looking at will change. The code remains the same and the only thing that has changed is the external .CSS file.

The beauty of CSS is that seeing is believing so can and have a look and believe.

Subscribe to Insights into PR and online marketing