Smooth, nice looking page headlines
Headlines are very important in keeping user’s attention focused on the page, and to suggest what the page is about, right? So, I’ve been trying to make them as nice as possible. Over the years I think I tried every method succesively, each time improving the look of the headlines.
At the beginning, I used to save all the headlines as gif images and load them in page. This worked fine for small websites with few pages, but became really hard when dealing with larger websites, and dynamic content.
After that, I saved every alphanumeric char as gif’s and with the help of a PHP function transformed a headline like “Welcome” into
Back then I found this pretty cool, but now I really hate the websites that are using this technique because the page is loading awkwardly…
In time, I created a PHP function that takes a string as a parameter and create an image on the fly with the string in it and using any TTF font I wanted. There are many websites that are using this technique, and I couldn’t say that’s very bad.
About a year ago, I found about the sIFR: Scalable Inman Flash Replacement. This technique is replacing HTML tags like H1, H2 with a SWF that looks way better. After a normal HTML page is loaded into the browser, a JavaScript function is executed to replace the designated tags, ids, or classes with Flash objects.
This is cool because search engines still see the original H1, while users see the nice looking SWF.