The written word in WebPlus!

Text in a web site is essential - without it, you can’t really communicate any sort of meaningful message. Also, without text, search engines will have nothing to identify your site with.

From a pure SEO point of view, text is your content, and you should have plenty of it if your site is to be found. What’s more, your content should be relevant and provide a high degree of “Useful” information.

In WEBPLUS you have two types of text. The first is the normal HTML text that you put into any web site, the other is artistic text - more commonly used for headings, titles and displaying text in non-standard, fonts.

You must differentiate between the two types of text. Below is an example of Artistic Text.

Artistic text is text that is usually in a non-standard font, or has special effects applied such as the drop shadow in our example above. Such text can also be rotated, or made to align to a path - such as an arch. If you use artistic text in your web site, it will inevitably be converted to a graphic image, especially if you apply effects. However, this is not always the case. If you simply type a line of text with the artistic text tool, it will remain as “computer readable” text for as long as it doesn’t get modified in some way (rotated or have effects applied).

 

The remainder of the text on this page is normal HTML text. This means it is set in HTML boxes that automatically wrap text at the right edges of the HTML frame containing the text. (artistic text doesn’t do this).It is also text that will display on a visitors computer in what is called a web-safe font. (Times or Ariel).

 

If you use non-standard fonts in HTML frames, the chances are that your computer will be the only one that can see the font you’ve used - everyone else's will convert the text into one of the web-safe fonts that all computers have.

 

If you absolutely MUST preserve a particular font for a page in your website, you must use artistic text and ensure that it is converted to an image on publishing. You must also remember, that artistic text that has become an image will no longer be readable by search engines.

 

The general rule of thumb is to only use artistic text to create “Artistic Headings, while leaving all your main article (or content) text as HTML.

 

You can always see if text is artistic or computer readable by simply previewing your site in a web browser. Artistic text will not be selectable (you can’t copy and paste it directly from the screen), but HTML (computer readable) text, will be selectable.