Notes on Writing for web sites.

Hello Blogger Buds,

I read a really interesting blog a week or so ago and wonder if I can find it again. I can never manage to hand onto addresses for blogs. Think that is some kind of mind game? If so, I am playing it with myself.

The fellow I was reading had a web site and I found his blog through a link from his site. He was writing about writing for web sites and the funny thing is I already knew most all of what he was talking about and have applied most of it to web sites I have designed, written for and so on. There was one thing though that caught my eye that I did not remember and that is about the length of text for web pages - by length, I mean to say how long across a line should be. Now all the web sites I build wind up having lines that are 60 characters long or there abouts and it is something I was well aware of but just don't think about anymore. It comes automatically when I am writing for a web site.

Let's see if I can put it like he did.

One of the most important ways you can make type easier to read on-screen is to control the length of each line of text. Lots of sites just let text run from one side of the screen to the other, and for those who have high-resolution screens, this can result in lines of text that are so long they're very difficult to read.

You can control the length of your text by creating HTML tables that are specified in pixels, rather than in percents. A good width for a line of text is between 60-70 characters, and this translates roughly into a table that's between 350 and 500 pixels wide.

The easier it is to read your text, the more likely someone is to read it. That's why good sites that have a lot of text, have a lot of blank space on the side, because it's more important to make your text readable than it is to fill every inch of the screen.

That is sort of what the guy was saying and about line length and white space - yes, I leave lots of white space normally except at a few sites that are busy, busy, busy on purpose. White space is a whole other subject and maybe I will save that for next time.

Also when I was at this guys site I realized he was selling software to build web sites, in fact it might have been the whole purpose of his site. I stayed there for quite a while as his writing was good, informative and well organized. I love reading good stuff. I may try to find his site again. I just have to remember what I was searching for when I stumbled upon it. I guess I should have bookmarked it. I do forget to do that too.

I stopped bookmarking a while back when it became more of a hassle to look down the list of bookmarked sites to find the one particular one I needed - as I have about a thousand bookmarked. Yeah, really.

Until next time - keep ur stick on the ice.

verb