It is safe to assume—since you're holding this book—that you work for a company of a reasonable size. This means you have bureaucracy and red tape to deal with, and that you have to contend with many different levels of staff. Making changes to your software or websites is not immediate and is weighed down with legacy protocols and processes. If none of this describes your situation, then you are lucky because you are in the minority.

The items mentioned here all sound like negative attributes, but many of them are unavoidable outcomes—particularly in businesses that have undergone rapid growth. The larger a company is, the slower it is typically to respond to change. Antony recalls spending months working on a project for a large blue-chip company, only to find (during a tour of the offices upon project completion) that it had its own software department on the ground floor that was more than capable of undertaking the project he had just completed. This is common among large businesses; they become so large it is difficult for work to be effectively communicated across the entire staff. Often different teams find they have been working on the same thing, and they just had no way of knowing it.

Companies can be driven by many things. They can be finance-driven, reputation-driven, brand-driven, or design-driven, to mention but a few. The driver of the business defines the business practices and protocols. Aside from, perhaps, the brand or design-driven company, the visual backbone of the software we developers build is not considered from the outset.

The CSS developer is often overlooked in the teams developing websites for these companies. Considered by many to be an easy thing to learn, CSS is often handed to server-side developers rather than web development experts, and the frameworks and static files that sit around CSS are frequently considered at the last minute rather than as part of the infrastructure from the beginning. Although the syntax of CSS is simple, the implications of its implementation are not trivial. A good CSS developer has experience in cross-browser pitfalls and how to avoid them, semantics, accessibility, search engine optimization, and the problems that arise due to badly built and documented CSS. A well-built CSS framework can have dramatic implications for the performance of a website. Moreover, a well-documented CSS framework is easy for many developers to work on in a consistent fashion. Particularly at the beginning of a website's life, getting this done right from the outset can pay dividends in the end.

We do not profess to be able to make your business fast to respond, with great communications and happy staff. However, throughout this book we aim to give you a good grounding in some of the processes you can follow to ensure that CSS is not the bottleneck in the development or performance of your website. In the final chapter and appendices, we will give practical examples of everything we have covered, and you can see code examples at the book's website (http://www.procssforhightrafficwebsites.com).