I wonder what the bandwith costs of the site would be if they switched to CSS. According to
http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2003/06/espn-interview ESPN.com saved 730 terabytes a year by switching from tables to CSS. Not to mention the other benefits mentioned above.
According to this link
http://alistapart.com/articles/slashdot/
Slashdot.com saved 9KB per request with a cached css file (this means ever page after the initial page load) and 2KB per request on non-cached pages. At 50 million pages in a month slashdot saved 14 GB bandwidth a day. Of course this article is written before slashdot switched to CSS. But they are now CSS and reaping its benefits. Of course the best part is you can use slashdot on any browser, even ones that can't render tables properly like my cell phone. Just go to the site and turn off css.
Of couse bandwith savings do not mean you will save money, sometimes it makes you money.
My final statement regarding the bandwidth (and hence money) savings did not quite pan out as expected. Bandwidth consumption has certainly decreased with the declining page weight but not by the proportion we were expecting. What actually happened was that people starting using the site more. It seems the faster pages (both in terms of bandwidth and rendering) resulted in more page views as people panned, zoomed and searched significantly more than they did before. So not only did the switch to CSS layout save Multimap money, it made Multimap money (page views = banner ad impressions) and quantitatively improved people?s experience (more page views per visit).
Real life savings through Web standards, by Richard Rutter, Clagnut, July 30, 2004 - source
http://brainstormsandraves.com/archives/2004/07/30/money/
Here are some tibits on wired switch to css.
The shiny details of the new Wired News design are only visible in standards-compliant browsers (Netscape versions 6.0 and higher, and IE 5.0 and higher). But because CSS can be hidden from older, non-compliant browsers, our content can still be read by every available commercial browser, even the first versions of Netscape and IE.
Our statistics show that as many as 86 percent of our regular audience uses supported browsers, but the other 14 percent will see a much simpler website with a stripped-down design that still provides the full content.
Finally, XHTML can be easily translated for a variety of Web devices such as PDAs and mobile phones. And with CSS, it can render differently in multiple devices according to their inherent capabilities.
Cascading stylesheets have been implemented on all pages for design uniformity, and to make it easy for designers to update and tweak the look and feel. Making one change in the CSS can propagate a design change instantly throughout thousands of pages. Redesigns could theoretically take place in minutes, rather than weeks or months, and smaller design tweaks can be made without having to restructure any HTML markup.
"This new design is more accessible, faster to download, more flexible and much easier on the Web server itself," Meyer said. "Anyone interested in the future of the Web need look no further than this."
source -
http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2002/10/55675
Even AOL.com is a pure css layout. If AOL the suck of the suck can do it, everyone can. Their userbase consists of the biggest slackers and computer inept humans on earth. Yet CSS doesn't hurt their business.
My favorite part about CSS is one I almost forgot. It allows me to control what sites I visit look like. I can make my own design for sites that I frequent. Maybe it's not useful to you, but for handicap people this could be useful, and for more tech oriented people like me, it is a benefit that goes well with greasemonkey.
Anyways, the more I convince people to use css, the more they come back to me with thank you. Usually they have a little learning curve and need my help for a week or so. But eventually they are using dreamweaver like normal making full CSS pages. I have one friend who now churns out awesome designs in half the time he used to take. He does a lot of web work (all of it I think) for Conn-Selmer (
http://www.conn-selmer.com/) a major player in the music industry. My favorite site they have is
http://www.ludwig-drums.com/ He even uses a table on it, for a actual table and not for layout.