The Web Safe Color Palette

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

The “Web Safe” palette is a bit controversial. It is a set of 216 colors that are, supposedly, guaranteed to appear as intended on all graphical displays when used in HTML, CSS, and images embedded in Web pages. Many Web developers believe that sticking to these colors is one of the holiest commandments in the Web design scripture.

This was mostly a concern when most computers had 8-bit color displays; these days, most people run at 16-bit or 24-bit color. Although these bit-depths render the Web Safe palette pointless, dithering and quantification bugs in browsers and operating systems still cause problems in 16-bit displays (16-bit display, also known as “High Color” mode or “Thousands of Colors,” is generally problematic). Extensive testing has led to a new palette, called “Really Safe,” whose colors are guaranteed to appear correctly on all displays and all browsers.

If you use different colors than these, you might see images and backgrounds of the same color appear at a slightly different tint, so that a “box” will be visible around them if the background extends beyond the image’s edges.

Below is the table of ‘Web Safe’ and ‘Really Safe’ colors, you will see some of the color hex codes are in red, these are ‘Really Safe’ colors.

Hopefully, you will find a use for the two different color palettes that are now available and, you can begin designing for your surfers, regardless of which browser they use.

Article written by Lee

Writing Your Sales Text – Some Facts

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Writing | Response: 0

Do you know the difference between writing sales text for print advertising i.e. magazines and, writing sales talk for websites?

Well some of these differences will go against your intuition however, these differences are based on how people read specific items.

Where Do Eyes Go First When Your Page Loads?

Contrary to what most webmasters think it may not always be towards the thumbnails and banners on your page instead, surfers eyes will more than likely go to the first few lines of text on the page therefore, your first chance at making a sale before the surfer starts to burn your bandwidth is to have some enticing text on any site or page you build. Another reason why learning to write good text links can benefit you long term.

Also, as most surfers will only look at a page for between three and fifteen seconds before they decide whether they want to stay on the site they are at or close it this now starts to question webmasters use of heavy graphics on their sites, if a graphic takes three to four seconds to load you have just lost valuable sales time on your site.

How Much Of Your Copy Do Users Actually Read?

On average surfers will read about 75% of the length of any given page. Again, this is good news because it now means we can draw our surfers attention tot he ‘important’ sections of our sites by using headlines and bullet points to make them stand out. Also, this means that, given surfers will read only the first 75% of any page that the bottom half of your pages may not be as important as what was first believed.

Why Do Most Banner Ads Produce Poor Click-Through Rates?

Again as with any advertising media there is only a specific time frame that anyone will look at something, in this case it has been found that the vast majority of surfer will spend a mere 1.25 seconds looking at a banner which, is about enough time to read say 5 words based on the average college students reading time of 350 words a minute.

Therefore, banners which are animated and can take up to 5 seconds to get all the information across may in effect be completely worthless on our sites. More bad news for webmasters who have fancy animations and the likes on our pages.

Why Is Reading Online More Frustrating Than Reading Print?

Did you know that reading text on a computer screen can cause your reading ability to slow by up to 25% in some cases? This means that over inflating pages with text heavy content may actually aggravate the surfer instead of draw there attention! But, how can we stop this from potentially losing us a sale? Simple here are a few suggestions.

Rather than having one long continuous stream of text have several smaller one or two line paragraphs of text.

Use headlines to summarize what you are telling the surfer for example, if you sponsor has free trials tell them in bold lettering ‘Free Trials’ you get the point across and, you may draw their attention to click on the text.

Are Your Web Page Users Not Getting The Whole Picture?

Can surfers ‘scan’ your website? Lets look back at the above figures, 75% of the page gets read, banners have an attention span of only 1.25 seconds on average, that’s not much time for a surfer to look at your pages.

I think that would probably explain the reason why surfers tend to ‘scan’ our sites and only concentrate on the free images, how many of us actually take the time to read word for word EVERYTHING on a page?

I know I hardly do I just sit there and scan the page for things that draw me into the text or site. This is true again for surfers in fact, estimated figures show that roughly 21% of surfers actually spend the time to read every single word on any site meaning the other 79% only scan through our sites this again, cuts down our marketing capabilities dramatically making it more important to have headlines and well laid out pages highlighting the part we want our surfer to look at, namely, our sponsor links.

If we do not do this we are in effect only making 21% of our marketing efforts count again, taking away from our profits. That’s a huge chunk of our surfers we are losing out on gleaming a sale from.

What do all of the above figures tell us? Simple, we need to keep our pages quick loading, concise and more importantly unique, we need to draw our surfers to the specific areas that we want them to go to first and, in the process we should start to make more money from each of our sites.

Article written by Lee

Outsourcing – Becoming More Profitable Online

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Employment | Response: 0

As webmasters we already do a lot of outsourcing from hosting our sites to design and marketing to getting traffic which we send to our sponsors. However, many of us are missing out on opportunities to outsource even more of our work and, by missing these opportunities, we are losing money.

Outsourcing work can consist of anything from translations, design, scripting, marketing, seo, site submissions and pretty much anything and everything in between.

However, before we outsource some work to others there are several factors that need to be taken into consideration these are what will be addressed in this article.

Cost.

Ensuring we work ‘cost-effectively’ is one thing we all want to do, we need to make a profit whilst still being able to develop our business further. One good way to find out if the costs of outsourcing outweighs the cost of keeping the work in house to make a simple list of both the time and financial involvements both in and out of house. For example, in house you may have employees that need paying to do the work, you will almost certainly need to spend a lot of your own time on the project and, more likely than not you will need to research the work you want to undertake, all of this can become costly when looked at in detail a good reason to outsource your work to another company or individual.

Benefits.

How will outsourcing benefit you and your business? As with the cost example above make a list of things that will benefit you from the time saved on the project to the monetary benefits of outsourcing the work and the completion times often, by outsourcing your work you can have it done in much less time than if you handled it yourself ‘in-house’ so to speak.

Flexibility.

What are the indirect benefits of you outsourcing your work? Not necessarily the money saved but more along the lines of time management. if you give a designer a list of ideas and suggestions you WANT your work to have, chances are, they will get it right the first time whereas, if you amble along experimenting with what you actually create you may, in effect, take much longer to complete the task in hand. By saving yourself time what else can you get done, whether it is building more sites or marketing your existing sites further the indirect benefits all weigh up more often than not, these benefits will be favorable to outsourcing the work.

Risk.

This is probably THE most important thing to take into account when considering outsourcing your work, what happens if, you pay for the outsourcing and, overnight the company who is doing the work for you goes out of business? What happens if someone you have in your employ decides that they would rather be doing the work rather than you outsourcing it? Financially can you afford to outsource the work? All of these factors need to be considered before undertaking any form of outsourcing.

Basically, what I am trying to tell you is that, if you spend a few moments actually running the numbers as oppose to the ideas you have in respect of your workload you will see that outsourcing can be come a valuable asset to your business and, more importantly, your bottom line profits.

Article written by Lee

Sample Adult Model Release Form

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Forms & Contracts | Response: 0

For many webmasters the option of being able to shoot their own content is a wholly viable one as such, you should ensure that the models you are using sign a suitable release form. Below we have set together a pretty industry standard model release form which you may duplicate if you so wish. European Webmasters would however, recommend that you get professional legal advice in respect of this matter and that this is no substitution for proper legal advice.

I, (Please Print) ____________________ (Model), for good and valuable consideration, the receipt of which is acknowledged, give to [INSERT YOUR LEGAL NAME HERE] (Photographer), his legal representatives, successors, and all persons or corporations acting with his permission, unrestricted permission to copyright and/or use, and/or publish photographic portraits or pictures of me, and the negatives, transparencies, prints, or digital information pertaining to them, in still, single, multiple, moving or video format, or in which I may be included in whole or in part, or composite, or distorted in form, or reproductions thereof, in color or otherwise, made through any media in his studio or elsewhere for art, or any other lawful purpose.

I hereby waive any right that I may have to inspect and approve the finished product or copy that may be used in connection with an image that the Photographer has taken of me, or the use to which it may be applied.

I further release the Photographer, or others for whom he is acting, from any claims for remuneration associated with any form of damage, foreseen or unforeseen, associated with the proper commercial or artistic use of these images unless it can be shown that said reproduction was maliciously caused, produced and published for the sole purpose of subjecting me to conspicuous ridicule, scandal, reproach, scorn and indignity.

I acknowledge that the photography session was conducted in a completely proper and highly professional manner, and this release was willingly signed at its termination.

I certify that I am not a minor under the laws where I live, and am free and able to give such consent.

Model’s signature:_________________________ day___/month___/year_____ Address:___________________________________ City:______________________________________ State/Province:______________________________ Country:___________________________________
Zip/Postal Code:_____________________________
Country area code and home telephone number:(______)____________________________
Witness (non family member):___________________________________
Witness (non family member):___________________________________
This form will be retained with the negatives, transparencies, digital media, and/or contact sheets. day___/month___/year_____ {INSERT YOUR LEGAL NAME HERE}.

The above model release form is to be used as a mere example form and, when entering into any contractual agreement with any model for photographic / video work you should always seek proper legal advice.

Article written by Lee.

Mirroring Adult Sites – Stage Four

Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: Promotion, Tutorials | Response: 0

We are now going to take our basic template and start to make some pages for the link lists for this you will need to open up your original warning page. Once you have this page open you need to visit a couple of the link lists that you use. Go to the submissions page of the link list and download their reciprocal buttons.

In the same way that we did with the TGP pages we created you now need to edit the warning page you have open and insert the recip links on your warning page, ideally and, as most link lists will require this, the recip links should be placed above the enter and exit links.

Once you have done this, you now need to save your newly edited page as linklist1.html in the /FreeSite/LinkList/ folder, do this for as many of the link lists that you wish to submit to, each time saving the new page in the /FreeSite/LinkList/ folder.

Also at this stage, we should add a console to our link list page, ideally a blur console with links going to your surfer trap FPA’s. You can find the Java coding to create a blur console on the tutorial about building a surfer trap.

Once we have done this, we now have some more sites created. However, this time, the page/s we have just created are designed to build the traffic we have to our site/s.

Once you have these pages saved you now need to re-open your original warning page once more.

This time, we are going to optimize the page for the search engines, again, in the same way we added our ALT tags on the surfer trap we are going to add them to the warning page however, we are also going to optimize our keywords, description and, site title.

Once we have optimized our original warning page we should now save this as se1.html in the /FreeSite/Engine/ folder we created at the start of this tutorial. Once one SE page has been created, you need to create a selection of others making sure that you swap around the meta tags to ensure they are all different to each other, I would suggest making three variations of these SE pages each time saving them in the /FreeSite/Engine/ folder.

The next thing we are going to do is to ‘dirty’ these SE pages up some more, pretty much in the same manner as we did with the surfer trap tutorial. What we need to do is add a small pop up console to the three SE pages along with a blur console, these consoles can be the same ones that we used for our surfer trap or, we can create new ones however, I think the smart thing to do would be if we used the ones we currently have online. So once we have added these consoles we need to save the pages.

Also, to these SE pages we should add our Banner exchange code, as these will be going into the search engines there are no rules as to what we can and can not do on these SE pages so we should make sure that even if they just get one hit, we get additional traffic from them. By adding a banner exchange code as we did on the surfer tutorial we can drive additional traffic either to our sites or to our surfer trap, where you send this traffic is your choice. If you want to sign up for our new banner exchange you can find it at http://www.pornclient.com.

Now we have the completed site template built. We need to submit the pages and sites we have just completed to the TGP’s, AVS’s, Link Lists and, the Search Engines.

Once we have submitted these sites all that we need to do to create a new set of sites is to find another set of 50 images, rename the images as we did at the start of this tutorial, pic1.jpg, thumb1.jpg etc and simply upload the site to our server without the full size images and the thumbnails. Once the HTML pages are online, we now have to upload the full size images and the thumbnails and we have a set of sites using different content to our original one built in less than 5 minutes.

The best thing with these sites is that if a any time we want to alter the layout, all we need to do is edit the HTML of the version we have saved on our HD and we have a new template ready to use.

I hope you have found some use out of this tutorial and, I am sure you can think of other ways in which we can use templates of this style, this tutorial was just detailing some of the basics however, we can make the template as simple or as complicated as we like. Our only limits are what we make for ourselves.

Article written by Lee

The Ins and Outs of European Domain Name Registration

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: Domain Names | Response: 0

A domain name is more than just your online adult business address; it’s a crucial aspect of your online adult business. It is closely linked to the way a surfer thinks of and, more importantly, remembers your site. In many European countries, domain names that end with a country code carry more weight with the Internet-surfing public than dot.com domain names. So, if you want to have of a chance of selling to a foreign adult surfer in a European country you might consider registering a European country code top-level domain name (ccTLD) for your site.

Obtaining a ccTLD could potentially:

• Increase your chance of getting listed on a national search engine. Many national search engines require a company to be local, however that may be defined, to be listed with them.
• Get you a higher ranking with a local search engine.
• Make your business more accessible to customers and vendors in a specific country.
• Make your business seem more local and thus help overcome any fear local customers might have of buying from a non-European outfit.

What Is a ccTLD, Anyway?

Generic top-level domains (TLDs) are not linked to any geographic area. They include the well-known and familiar .com, .org, and .net domain names. In contrast to these generic TLDs, there are ccTLDs: Each country and territory in the world has its own TLD. They include, for example, .at for Austria, .be for Belgium, and so on.

Essentially the domain name policies regulate who can register what type of a domain. In principle, nearly anyone can register a generic TLD.

It is important to keep in mind that you might lose a domain name you recently registered in Europe if another company can prove in court that the name is rightfully theirs. If the court decides that the plaintiff has a right to it, you will lose that domain name however, I am assuming that nobody reading this is going to be considering registering ccTLD’s for the purpose of cyber squatting.

Each country or region has its own rules, policies, and regulations about who can register a ccTLD, and how. Common restrictions include the requirement to be a local registered company or to have registered the company and/or company name as a national trademark in a specific country. However, some countries are less strict about who can register. As always, it depends on the country and its particular rules.

The table below is meant to give you easy access to the information you will need when you are ready to register a European domain name for your site.

Here is an explanation of the categories used in the domain registration table:

• Country: Name of the country you might want to obtain a domain name for your business in.
• Name of domain: The ccTLD (a two-letter abbreviation).
• Must be local: This can mean that your business presence, your company’s physical presence, or your trademarks must be local.
• More domains possible: Some countries limit the number of domains that you can register.
• Same name as owner: Some countries require that the registered name be the same name as the owner’s company name or trademark.
• Signed contract: Some domain name registration agencies demand a written, signed declaration or contract to be sent in. If in doubt, read up on specific rules relative to the specific domain name registrars you will be using.

Now you can see the possibilities available in respect of registering more than just dot.com addresses perhaps you might like to find a country you would want to gain some extra traffic from and see about registering a ccTLD and developing it.

Also, you could improve your chances of gaining additional traffic to your new ccTLD domain by having some country specific language on that domain, again, how your site comes across to the surfer is just as important than the domain and, there are plenty of Adult Site Translation companies out there who can assist you with this part of the ccTLD development.

There are, of course, other ways to gain additional foreign surfers other than just registering a ccTLD for example, on European Webmasters we have a domain name registration section that will allow you to translate specific text in order to gain type in foreign traffic on dot.com TLDs perhaps, if you don’t want to or, cant register a ccTLD in the country of your choice you might like to take this approach at gaining additional foreign traffic to your sites.

I hope this article has given you a little insight into the varieties of domain names available in and around Europe and that you might just register a domain and see for yourself how profitable the European markets are.

Article written by Lee

Pay Per Click Traffic – More Than One Use

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Paid Traffic | Response: 0

We all know the stigma surrounding getting traffic to our sites and, this is no different with that of the PPC traffic sources. We have all heard varying stories of success and failure when it comes to this type of traffic whether it be from Googles Adwords program, Overture PPC engine listings or in fact, highly targeted Sex.com adult traffic.

But how much do we all actually know about maintaining this level of traffic once we actually get it and at a minimal cost to our bank balance?

First of all there seems to be a belief that PPC traffic should be sent to a sponsor or one of our existing sites, this is all good and proper but, what happens when the sites we own or the sponsors we use don’t convert on this traffic do we just give up? For the most part, yes webmasters do tend to give up and mark this source of unrivalled traffic as a flop.

Enter the world of traffic manipulation.

We all know about a variety of programs that are available to drive traffic to our existing sites from banner exchanges like Pornclient to text link exchanges like TextPop even to top lists.

So why don’t we utilize these when we buy PPC traffic? Quite simply many webmasters forget that traffic can be manipulated regardless of where it comes from initially.

Lets take a simple listing on sex.com, you fund your account and traffic starts to flow, you get 1000 hits per day for as long as you have funds in your account. Were you aware that this 1000 hits could in fact, become 10,000 hits if we actually thought about our pay per click listings.

How you may be asking especially with so many rules being levied upon us by the PPC traffic sources? Simple, set up a filter page, on this page you should place a single text link which would be your entry link however, you should also place a few other items on the page this is what i will explain next.

Ideally you want to be able to use the traffic you are paying for in order to build up a larger traffic base this is where the use of such programs as banner exchanges and the likes come in handy.

As well as your entry link you should also place a banner exchange (or a text exchange) code on your filter page this will mean that for every visit your page gets from the PPC Engine you are accruing credits towards additional visitors.

In addition to the link exchange you might also like to consider placing a counter on this page specifically, a toplist counter such as Outster or sextracker so, for every page view you receive you get rated further on their toplist.

Also, as we are on the subject of top lists why not place a text link to one on this page? Even though you are sending your traffic out you are actually getting sometimes in excess of twice that back depending on the toplist you choose to use.

Now we have the basics set up we need to look at what else we can do to maximize this traffic, i would suggest having a single console (preferably a blur console) load on this page if the PPC SE allows again, this should contain a link exchange of some description however, you will need to make sure that the account you are using is separate to the one on your filter page.

Finally, remember the entry link, that shouldn’t go directly to your sponsor instead, send it to an FPA (Full Page Ad) first and, on this FPA place a table ad which is pure text at the bottom again, sending this traffic to a variety of other niche filter pages all set up in the same method as the one we have just made above.

Hopefully by using these methods your ventures into the Pay Per Click search engine world will be more fruitful than the webmasters not using the above method.

Article written by Lee

European Surfers – Porn High On The List!

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: General | Response: 0

Adult web sites were visited by 3.8 million home Internet users in the UK in June 2001, according to Internet monitoring company Net Value. This accounts for more than a quarter of the entire UK home Internet population.

UK visitors to adult websites spent more than 45 minutes on these sites each in June. Adult sites make up 41.2 per cent of all the sites visited in the UK with a significant audience. Students (23.2 per cent), manual workers (15 per cent), and professionals (12.8 per cent) are the largest groups of UK visitors to adult sites.

However Germany has the largest audience for online porn in Europe with more than 5.3 million Germans visiting an adult site in June. They also spent more time on these type of sites than any other nationality – each German visitor spent almost an hour on adult sites in June. Net Value data also showed that more than half (52.3 per cent) the websites visited in June by a significant number of German users were of an adult orientated nature.

Spain has the greatest proportion of visitors to pornographic sites – 40 per cent of Spanish home Internet users visiting a pornography site in June 2001.

“Pornography has become a lucrative online business, with many companies now recognizing it as a valuable additional revenue stream,” Net Value’s Alki Manias said. “And this would seem to be a stable business area – the popularity of online pornography continues unchecked.”

Adult sites are also popular amongst the earliest adopters of the Internet. People who first got online at home before 1997 account for 18.5 per cent of visitors to adult sites, though they only make up 14.1 per cent of the whole UK online population.

In the UK, Lastminute.com has just introduced an auction for adult toys and aids, whilst in Germany, Freenet.de and T-Online are also moving into the adult business.

The following charts detail various demographics relating to European surfers usage of adult sites:

Number of adult websites visited, June 2001

* Sites with a significant reach

UK visitors to adult websites by occupation, June 2001

As you can now see, we, as adult webmasters, have a considerable chunk of the online adult industry sitting in our laps and, we should concentrate on tapping into this market as more and more American companies are realizing the importance of these figures we will inevitably reach a stage where the European market will be passed across to our US counterparts.

Favicon.ico – What Does It Do?

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

Favicon.ico is the name of the graphic Internet Explorer 5+ uses in the address bar and when someone views their favorite bookmarks. There should be one beside the address of this page now if you are using IE5+. If you want to see favicon.ico in action among your favorites bookmark our site now by right clicking and selecting ‘Add to favorites’.

Internet Explorer looks for this file in the same directory as the HTML page currently being displayed, if it cant find favicon.ico it will then display the default Internet Explorer icon in the address bar. As for viewing of favorites, IE will check its temporary folder to see if favicon.ico is there again, if it is not located it will display the default white background with a blue ‘e’ icon.

For a webmaster there are three main advantages to using the favicon.ico ‘trick’.

The first, is that it helps to brand your site with a nice little icon that is easy to recognize.

The second, is that it makes your website more professional.

The third, is that your entry will stand out in surfers bookmarks over the others. This is especially good as, if you can get a surfer back to your site then you have another chance at making a sale.

Many internet users have a multitude of site bookmarks so, you need to use favicon.ico to give you an edge. I highly recommend using it and, now I’m going to tell you how.

First, you will need to create an icon file which is exactly 16 x 16 pixels. If the icon is larger or smaller IE5+ will just ignore it. As for the colors in it, 16 is standard. You can use more colors if you want but, the more colors you use, the larger the .ico file becomes and, the longer it takes to load.

You now know the standards the favicon.ico file has to be, now to actually create this file you can take one of two routes.

The first is to convert and existing 16 x 16 BMP or GIF graphic with 16-32 colors into an .ico file using converter software making sure to save it as favicon.ico.

You know the standards the favicon.ico file has to be, now to actually create favicon.ico . The easiest way of creating a favicon.ico file is to convert an existing 16 X 16 BMP or GIF graphic with 16 – 32 colors into a .ico file using converter software making sure to save it as favicon.ico.

Once you have created your favicon.ico file all you need to do is to upload it to any directory on your server that contains html pages. This way, when IE5+ searches for favicon.ico it will be bale to find it regardless of which page you are on.

That’s nearly all the areas of favicon.ico covers apart from, what if you want different icons for different parts of your website? Can this be done? The answer is yes it can. All you have to do is place the following HTML code between the <head> and </head> tags of your web page.

<LINK REL=”SHORTCUT ICON” HREF=”differenticon.ico”> (SHORTCUT ICON should be kept in uppercase).

Now when someone adds a web page with that code to their favorites, IE5+ will not look for favicon.ico but will look for differenticon.ico and if it’s there it will display it, if not the default icon will be displayed.

Using favicon.ico or the SHORTCUT ICON code is nice way to add a unique touch to your site, and of course will result in more repeat visitors than if you were not using it – which is always good for any webmaster.

Article Written By Le

Fonts – Everything You Wanted To Know

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

All web browsers use standard fonts. Mostly two types, one for proportional, one for mono spaced fonts. Proportional (or variable width) characters adapt in width, an “m” uses more space than an “i”. Mono spaced (or fixed width) characters are all equal in width, typewriter style.

Most browsers use “Times” for proportional fonts. This font was originally developed by the London Times news paper. “Courier” is used for mono spaced. This was a very popular font used for mechanical typewriters. Both are normally set to 12 points (1/72nd of an inch).

Serif And Sans Serif.

Both these fonts are so called serif fonts. The French word serif indicates the little strokes at the outer ends of the characters. They are very old, you see them in old gothic handwriting, or Greek and Roman buildings. Partly used for ornamental reasons, partly because the characters are easier distinguished.
It’s a little odd they are used on computer screens. These are by nature quite coarse, which makes serif characters quite grainy and ugly. Sans serif characters generally display a lot better on screens. Sans serif literally translates to “without stroke”. Probably the most popular sans serif font is Helvetica or derivatives like Windows’ Arial.

<FONT FACE=”Arial”>…</FONT>

The FONT Tag.

The html tag for fonts is a somewhat crude instrument. Most word processors let you use any font you like, as long as it’s on your system. And that’s the first big problem in web browsers. You have no control over other systems’ fonts. So you will have to choose a font which is likely to be on any system out there.

<FONT FACE=”Arial,Helvetica,Sansserif”>…</FONT>

Typeface.

The font tag accommodates this by letting you specify several fonts in the FACE attribute. If the first one is not available, the second is used, and so on. The set above is often used. Arial is on all Windows systems, Helvetica on Macintosh, Sans serif on UNIX. The same is true for mono spaced fonts in the line below.

<FONT FACE=”Courier New,Courier,Mono”>…</FONT>

Size.

Word processors let you specify font sizes in points exactly. No such luck in web browsers. There are seven sizes to choose from, denoted 1 (smallest) through 7 (largest). If this SIZE attribute is not used it defaults to 3. I think the default 12 point size is a bit big, so I use 2 for size, which gives you about a 10 point character. Some browsers let you set the overall font size smaller or larger. Which makes this issue even more awkward.

<FONT SIZE=”2″>…</FONT>

There is a nasty bug in some browsers. When using a block of text with size 1, the last line skips a line. This bug can be squashed by putting a <BR> tag immediately after the block of text. If your browser has this bug it will show in the second text below.

There is a nasty bug in some browsers. When using a block of text with size 1, the last line skips a line. This bug can be squashed by putting a <BR> tag immediately after the block of text (with break).

Color.

Fonts can have any color you like, much like the colors in the body tag. Keep readability always in mind, avoid clashing colors and little contrast. You can create nice shading effects. But don’t make a Christmas tree out of your page by using too many colors.

<FONT COLOR=”red”>…</FONT>

Style Sheets.

There is a chance all this soon will be replaced by style sheets. They do let you specify exact point sizes, even use downloadable fonts. But for now I would advise against that, since not all current browsers understand them. You could however use a combination of both, should you want to.

Article written by Lee