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Chapter 28. Customizing the Look of Posts

A good deal of the look of a website has to do with the look and layout of the text. Whether it's choosing fonts, choosing sizes, or choosing colors, the appearance of your text is important not only for a unified look, but for the site's readability. In Lesson 8 I talked about using the Text Editor to lay out individual posts. Now I want to look at using the style sheet to control the look of all posts.

Making Text Easy to Read

The following are four key elements to the readability of text on the Internet:

• The font

• The size of the text

• The spacing between lines of text

• The width of the text area

Most of these elements will be taken care of in a well-built theme, but you still may want to change them.

In the case of Island Travel, you've no doubt noticed that all the text is justified — the left and right margins are flush. And you may remember me saying that, for the most part, I don't like justified text. So I'm going to change my style sheet to get rid of the justification.

The first step is to find out what CSS rule is governing the justified text on the site. By looking at the source code for Island Travel I know that text within any division named "post" will be justified, so in my style sheet I look for the post rule that says text-align: justify; and I change it to text-align: left;. After saving my style sheet and refreshing my browser, the result can be seen in the left half of Figure 28-1.

Figure 28-1. Figure 28-1

That's the text alignment ...