Friday, April 29, 2011

text vs images in websites

Websites can be produced in a number of ways, but this post is going to focus on text vs images.

vs.  text

You know you can post images/photos online, but you can also produce an entire site of nothing but images. It’s not that it won’t have text, just that it’s text is an image of text, not actual text. Each computer/tablet/smartphone does not have access to the same typefaces, so online text is limited to a choice of serif, like Times or Georgia, where each letter has little details at the end of strokes or sans-serif, like Arial/Verdana/Helvetica, where there are none.* (It’s commonly held that serif faces are easier to read at small sizes.)

You cannot control how anything will appear on someone else’s system. Bear this in mind: they may have their browser set for 18 pt type b/c their eyesight isn’t good, or at 7 pt type b/c their screen is small and their eyesight is fantastic. These variables could make your site appear far differently than you expected. This is what CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is for - styling a page to allow for the variability of machines and browsers. The only absolute way to override users’ preferences, however, is to present them with an image, not actual text.

Imagine you set up a document and then took a picture of it, then loaded the picture on the screen, and you get the idea. You could enlarge it or reduce it and the relationship between the elements would always remain the same, and you could choose any typeface (font) you wanted without worrying it would default to what was available on the viewer- that’s the concept behind an image based site. Flash sites are image based sites that include movement and interaction. You can see text embedded in them, but you can’t select that text or copy it. This is a good thing if you don’t want anyone copying your text and images, but what can’t be copied also can’t be read by google or any other search engine, so it won’t do anything for your search results. Also, text that is an image will degrade when greatly enlarged- zoom in on the text image and you'll see that it becomes fuzzier that the word "text" next to it. (see April 16th- images and resolution) Text in a web image is optimized for viewing at a specific size- change that size and you get slightly less clear copy. But if you prefer not to be limited to the few systems fonts, you may want to consider an image-based site. There are ways to provide the search engines with information they can use, and other methods of promoting your site. It will take longer to reach the top of the search, but it may be a compromise you’re willing to make if you want something really different, and you want assurance that it will appear exactly the same to every viewer.

*Web-based fonts are coming of age, with the idea of expanding user font choices, but that’s a post for another day!

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