Monday, June 1, 2009

Tweaks, fonts and such

4:31 PM / Web / CommentsNo Comments

Web

Less than 24 hours into its life, I've made a slight alteration to the site. The main menu at the top of each page now consists of text links rather than images. In addition to reducing the amount of data that has to be loaded, I also think it looks slightly neater, and has the added benefit of making site spiders more likely to pick up the links. Image-based menu buttons are something of a holdover from my pre-CSS days, where in order to get the text looking the way I wanted, I basically had to do it with graphics. Nowadays, though, there's very little you can't do can't do with a little bit of CSS trickery. (Shadows still seem to be the biggest stumbling block.)

On a semi-related note, I came across avery interesting concept today which should put an end to web designers being restricted to a handful of accepted "safe" fonts - Arial, Times, Verdana and the like. Essentially, the idea behind Typekit is that a library of commercial and freeware fonts is stored on an online database. Web designers essentially "opt into" the ones they want to use for their site, add a single line of JavaScript to their code, and then use whichever fonts they've chosen without having to worry about users not having them installed. It remains to be seen just how effective this scheme ends up being, particularly as far as the quantity of fonts on offer is concerned, but with Typekit launching at some point this summer, it doesn't look like we'll have to wait long to find out. To me, it certainly sounds like a very exciting possibility, given that I felt slightly hamstrung in only having a limited array of fonts at my disposal when designing this site.

 
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