Are you overlooking text in your web design

The most overlooked part of good web design is text content. Far too often we see websites with text laid out in basic paragraph form on a page. Although text is one of the main factors used to rank your site, quite often it is not used correctly for eCommerce.

Let's face it — if every website on the Internet always displayed text in basic paragraph form, it would be pretty boring.

Whether you use text to build basic content pages to draw traffic in, or use it to highlight specific products or services you sell, there are some important things you should consider when laying out text. Each heading or sub-heading and paragraph should stand out from other topics on the page. This includes proper use of "whitespace" to visibly separate the different topics. You should also highlight or emphasize specific key topics you want visitors to follow.

The use of bolded section headings (topic titles), images, paragraph backgrounds and borders are other key element you should take time to consider when laying out text. These items, including the text content, can all play a part in the SEO ranking of any given page on your site.

Ideally you want to draw attention to specific key points or topics on your page. Think of it this way - a web page should read like a newspaper page to human visitors and point a reader in a specific direction when they find a topic of interest to them.

ShopFactory includes several tools to help you add pizazz to your text based web pages. One of the basic tools is the use of "tables" to layout text and images on a page. Although it has some limitations, it's well worth using the basic table layout tools included in ShopFactory to break-up topics.

For a basic understanding in using tables properly, you can watch this video:  ShopFactory Tables Video

Using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a more advanced method for handling text and page layouts. ShopFactory fully supports "on page CSS" to help you display page layouts with more styling tools when compared to tables alone. In fact, CSS has substantially more power for styling, formatting and layout page content. Even if you're a beginner - it's well worth the effort to learn a bit of CSS as the power behind it can help you give your text layouts that "WOW" factor.

Using CSS requires you to add your on page styling using the "Add HTML Code" tool in ShopFactory. Once your styling is added in, you can use the on page "edit" HTML <H> Icon to modify the styling elements on the page. You can also add in additional SEO related hidden styling elements such as "H1, H2, etc." tags using CSS styling.

One perfect example of proper CSS text layout styling can be found on this ShopFactory user's home page: http://www.oreweb.ca/

This example shows how using boarders, headings and paragraphs can turn even "basic text" into a page with several focus topics. Proper white space use, rounded section borders, and background shading is also applied to break up the page. More advanced CSS also allows for some functionality such as mouse roll-overs to help guide a visitor in a certain direction for linked content.

Simple CSS “on page” modifications are best to do inside ShopFactory using the “Add HTML” function only. There are some more advanced things you can do with ShopFactory and CSS - but you must have a full understand CSS and ShopFactory theme development with our ShopFactory Developer Guide (the bottom right link on our support login page).