Standards-based web-authoring requires the separation of structure (HTML) and presentation (CSS). This is often perceived as 'CSS design', which overlooks the essential benefit of the standards-based approach: maximizing the shelf-life of documents, achieved through optimal, semantic HTML.
With presentation separate from structure, multiple designs can be easily achieved solely by creating additional style sheets. This is only effectively possible if the quality of the HTML is considered paramount from the outset.
This was the case in a recent project I undertook for Cordsel Technologies in which an e-commerce catalog site comprising 75 templates was quickly re-skinned for multiple brands following the production of the initial templates. While the templates were built over a period of several weeks, each of the four additional sites were re-skinned in just a few minutes.
ex. 1: one HTML doc, 3 style sheets:
ex. 2: one HTML doc, 3 style sheets:
