If you’re building an adult site and you plan to use some quality text, it might be an idea to first decide how you want to present it. A good place to start is right at the top – take a few moments out of your day and check what the really big sites do to represent written content. If you’re not entirely sure of what you should be looking for – read on and acquire a quick crash course in proper copy presentation.
The first, and for some, the most important aspect of presenting text is the typeface you choose. There are literally dozens of established, professional typefaces available and they each have their distinct uses. Just a quick note – a ‘typeface’ is the actual shape, height and style of each letter, the font is how you choose to style the typeface. For instance, ‘Calibri’ is a typeface, Calibri 13-point bold is a font. Be sure to visit a few sites that talk about typefaces and decide which one is going to best suit your intended use. One tip I can give though – never use Wingdings, unless you know your audience can understand this frivolous typeface.
The second step is choosing a decent way to stylize your typeface. For sites that rely on written content, I’d suggest a ‘size’ of 12 or 13, although you will obviously want to adjust this for titles, footnotes and subheadings. If you’re building a blog and plan to have written content for SEO reasons, it’s a good idea to lower this size – although don’t be too over the top with this, as search engines may punish your site for intentionally hiding content on an indexed page.
Some webmasters also like using bold/italics on certain words they want search engines to see. Some swear that tactics such as this are essential to content SEO, although others stand opposite and claim it has very little or no weight at all when it comes to optimization. If you do decide to do this, make sure you don’t flood too many style changes, as it will probably kill the emphasis you were trying to get in the first place and ultimately make your text unattractive to read.
The final consideration is alignment. There are four settings when it comes to aligning text – left, center, right and justified. Left is certainly the most popular of these, it’s the standard form of English text and works well. Though of course, justified gives a professional feel to things and avoids sporadic line lengths.
So there you have it, a simple guide to present content professionally.
