The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success, 3rd Edition

Techniques and Tactics

The purpose of this book is not to teach you all you need to know about how to design an effective web page. It is more focused upon helping you understand the big picture, and imparting some of the little-known—and better-known—tips and tricks picked up along the way. If you really want to get into the technical side of web page programming, get books such as Creating Web Pages For Dummies by Bud E. Smith and Arthur Bebak.

Even so, some techniques and tactics help avoid many of the common errors that most people make. The first and most damaging relates to fonts. Never use serifs.

A serif is a term for characters that have a line crossing the free end of a stroke, sometimes referred to as feet and hats (see Figures 4.6 and 4.7). This style of typeface is thought to have been invented by the Romans. It is the most often used style of font and also one of the most legible styles in print, but not on the web. The popularization of this font style emerged in newspapers, where the font size was nine point or smaller. Because this made large blocks of text difficult to read, adding the serifs—or the short line segments—created a sort of top and bottom line for the eye to follow when reading. Remember the faint blue lines that teachers taught writing with in first grade?

FIGURE 4.6 Serif Font

FIGURE 4.7 Sans Serif Font

This aid became so helpful to the newspaper ...