Archive for February, 2009

Using sIFR to add cool text to your site

by Matthew on February 18th, 2009 No Comments »

For years, people with web sites have had to make a choice between using a dull “web-safe” font for text headings to ensure search engine optimization and using images for headings to create the desired look and feel for their site.  As obsolete browsers are fading into obscurity and cool new internet technologies are being introduced almost daily, the need to compromise between appearance and searchability is no more.

sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) is a method that allows developers to insert any font into a without sacrificing accessibility, SEO, or markup validation.  We use sIFR on several of our client sites and our own (for an example look no further than the title of this post).  Here’s how it works:

The page is loaded into the browser as normal with all sIFR text being rendered as standard HTML text.  Then sIFR uses JavaScript to recreate the text in Flash to display the desired font.  To the browser and all search engines, the text appears to be normal text, while the end user sees the cool font redrawn in Flash.  If the end user does not have a Flash Player installed on their browser or JavaScript is disabled, the standard HTML text will display, so that all of your users can still view the page.

For sIFR documentation and FAQs, click here.

WordOff: The Cure for the Word Blues

by Daniel on February 10th, 2009 3 Comments »

Here’s a scenario that’s all too common among anybody who updates the content of their web site: You receive a Microsoft Word document with text that needs to be put online. The logical thing to do would be to copy and paste the content from Microsoft Word into a WYSIWYG editor, common in most content management systems such as WordPress, Joomla, and so forth.

So what’s the problem? The behind-the-scenes formatting code put in place by Word. This code is inserted with good intentions in mind, but more often than not results in you wasting a good amount of time manually reformatting all of the text. In some cases this is done on a line-by-line basis.

That’s where WordOff.org comes to the rescue.

WordOff.org is a handy web site with one purpose: It allows users to paste text, copied from Microsoft Word, into the text box they provide. Once that is done, you simply click on the “clean up” button and within a second or two your content will have the Word formatting removed.

Now all you have to do is copy the clean content from the text box and paste it into your WYSIWYG editor.