AdSense Case Study: Stage 4 begins
We're now moving on to Stage 4 of the AdSense case study featuring the Invisible Fence Guide. Unless, of course, there are more anonymous objections to the whole process! 
At this point we have a functional site, but it's not very professional looking. The images have spiced it up a bit, but overall it still needs a lot of work. From a search engine standpoint, however, the pages are very clean — use the “view source” option of your browser on any of them and you'll see that they're very easy for both humans and computers to read.
To keep our pages clean, we're going to use cascading style sheets, or CSS for short, to handle most of the presentation aspects. CSS is featured prominently in my book, of course, and any new sites built today should really be CSS-based as much as possible. All the modern browsers have CSS support, even though there may be inconsistencies among how different browsers handle some of the more advanced aspects of CSS. But we're not going to do anything that advanced. And hey, the browsers were all inconsistent in their handling of basic HTML anyhow, so nothing's really changed on that front.
The term “cascading style sheet” seems ominous, but it's not. The “style sheet” part is easy to understand: you place the style definitions in “sheets”, which might be embedded directly into the HTML of a page or stored in a separate file. The “cascading” part refers to the fact that you can have multiple style sheets (a “cascade”) affecting the same web page and that the browser needs to order them in some way to figure out which rules it must actually apply. But you're not going to create complicated CSS rules, so in general you can ignore the cascade part.
More on CSS shortly. Really, it's easier than you think.
Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book. Or add it directly to your Amazon shopping cart!