Media Outreach

Today is Wednesday, and it is raining heavily in my beloved Austin, Texas. The weather forecast calls for rain for the next 48 hours at least. I don’t recall having seen the sun since this weekend. What, you might ask, does any of this have to do with a blog post about best practices for a website? Absolutely nothing, save for the fact that the lack of natural sunlight and vitamin C has robbed me of my somewhat rapier wit, so if you’re looking for the funny in this blog post, keep moving.

I had a conversation yesterday with this guy, about website content (yes, we really do talk about website content). We both agreed that, no matter how much time is spent on making content look great, if it doesn’t flow with the graphics around it, the website will never look “right.” Below are some tips to make sure your content and graphics are copacetic with each other:

1. Color – Making good color decisions in your content can be the difference between “wow, that looks awesome,” and “does that say ‘disestablishmentarianism’ or ‘cat?’” Make sure that the colors you use for the text in your content allow it to be easily read against the background. In general, websites that utilize white backgrounds in their content areas are usually able to get away with more than website that use darker or textured backgrounds. However, if your site does have something other than a white background, you can still have clearly visible content… you’ll just need to make smart decisions about what is and is not easily readable.
2. Images – Good written content is often supplemented with images that are relevant to the topic at hand. However, the manner in which these images are presented can have a negative impact as well as a positive one. For example, if the permanent background graphics of your site are in a grunge style, with the images having rounded edges, then using a lot of images with hard, straight edges in the content could potentially create a sense of discord between the content and graphics. By maintaining a look and style similar to the graphics in the permanent background, you’ll create a sense of continuity throughout the site.
3. Font Selection - One of the questions I get asked most about faithHighway’s editor is “can we add additional fonts to the editor?” At faithHighway, our editor utilizes the web standard fonts. While it is possible to utilize a less common font in your content by saving written text as an image and uploading that image into the content area, I generally recommend against doing so. For one, text that is saved as an image cannot be seen by search engine crawlers, which will in turn hurt your search engine results. Most of all though, the web standard fonts were selected for a reason. They may not be the most exciting fonts ever created, but they are legible, professional, and they present your content in a way that, matched with the appropriate color selection, makes it easy to read.

Once again, I’ve run out of space, so it’s time for us to part ways for this week.  The tips above will ensure that your graphics and content combine to form a perfect harmony, the likes of which have not been seen since McCartney and Wonder. That was not, by the way, a joke. It’s still raining, and I’m still not being funny until I can get some natural light up in here. Until next week then, I hope you all have a wonderful week, and remember that there’s an awesome pregame show for the Super Bowl going on in your church on Sunday morning.

Photo By: AlmazUK