Press Release Summary: 5 Easy Ways to Improve Your Website\'s Legibility
Press Release Body: 5 Easy Ways to Improve Your Website\'s Legibility
Websites that make their customers work to read them are not the best way to get business. Miniscule fonts, text in colors that make it hard to see against the background color, and lines that are piled on top of each other are problems, but they\'re easy to correct. Let\'s jump right in and look at five easy fixes: 1. Format your text using CSS. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are the way to go - use one style sheet and control how text looks on your entire site. Make a change to the style sheet and your whole site is updated. It makes life a lot simpler. 2. Make the font size big enough to read. Consider your target audience. Even if they are a group of teenage girls looking for new shoes, it\'s never a good idea to use tiny type. It doesn\'t have to be enormous, but up to a point, larger type is better. 12-pt Verdana is better than 8-pt Verdana.
3. Make the text contrast with its background. The more contrast, the better. Black-on-white or white-on-black are examples of the highest contrast you can get. Use colors if you like, but if you squint at the page and your text basically vanishes, there\'s not enough contrast. 4. Give the lines room to breathe. Don\'t stack lines on top of each other. Use the line-spacing directive in CSS and give it some space; I\'ll often set line-spacing to 140% of the height of a typical line. 5. Break text up into chunks. No matter how good a writer you are, people don\'t want to read endless pages of text. Break it up by using headlines that reflect the subject of the paragraph(s) to follow so people can scan down to the parts that really interest them, or use bulleted lists to change the pace of the writing and slow down the scanning. And finally (not one of the 5 Easy Ways to Improve Legibility but still quite important) check your spelling. Nothing irritates me more on a web page than spelling errors - it simply makes you look like you don\'t care enough to get it right. Use that ubiquitous spellcheck tool. Making your website\'s content more legible is easy. It doesn\'t take a lot of time, mainly common sense. The payoff will be text that\'s more readable, customers that stick around long enough to get your message, and improved credibility with your visitors
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While many of you are familiar with SSI (Server Side Includes) and its tremendous usefulness as a server feature, did you know that the technology supports conditions? Imagine being able to give your SSI code logic, so it executes different commands, depending on variables such as browser type, time of day, referring URL, and whatever else can be accessed and compared in Perl. Something like that would be nothing less than revolutionary, and fortunately, possible! Just to review, SSI are \"codes\" you place on your page that the server picks up and executes. The most common use of SSI is to include a file on the page:
The above command will cause the file \"afile.htm\" to be inserted and displayed, as if it were manually added to the page. Adding Condition to the Mix This is what we\'re here for- to learn how to supply SSI with a little intelligence. Time to unveil the four flow-control statements of Server Side Includes:
They work as you would expect with any if/else statements. In JavaScript, the above would be equivalent in logic to \"if\", \"else if\", and \"else\", respectively. The last command is an odd ball; it serves no particular purpose except that\'s it\'s needed at the end of each conditional SSI definition. Take a look at the following example, which embeds two different files onto the page, depending on whether the user is using Internet Explorer or not:
Output: You are using IE! Got your attention now, didn\'t I? By using conditional SSI, with the environmental variable HTTP_USER_AGENT as the condition to test for, the above example allows us to display browser specific content in such a versatile way that no client side language (such as JavaScript) can match. It\'s SSI with a brain baby! Taking Things One Step Further Let\'s now build on what we have so far, and create a more refined example that discriminates not only between browser type, but browser version as well. How about a SSI code that differentiates between IE 4, NS 4, and neither?
You are using IE 4 or above
You are using Netscape 4 or above
You are using something other than IE 4+ or NS 4+
Output: You are using IE 4 or above
If you\'re not familiar with Perl programming, then parts of the above code undoubtedly look alien to you. Without this being a Perl tutorial, in a nutshell, regular expressions is used to extract out the relevant browser info in HTTP_USER_AGENT. The variable contains the following: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; InfoPath.1) Use a different browser, and note the difference in the output. In Conclusion We\'ve introduced here in general how to implement conditional SSI. The examples shown above are just a peek into the possibilities...how smart your SSI codes are now depends on your knowledge of Perl programming. Either way, time to get crackin\'!
2022
