Text as Images in Web Pages

October 14th, 2008 Amir

Often we see texts appearing as images in websites. These texts will make localization more difficult and costly and can easily be avoided.

What does ‘text as images’ mean?

A web page can contain many different elements, such as texts, graphics, Flash and other embedded objects. It’s possible to create things that appear the same way using different techniques.

For example, the following ‘Download’ button:

Text version Graphics version
DOWNLOAD

Although these two buttons look very similar, they are in fact quite different. One is the text ‘Download’, formatted to appear like 3D button and the other is an image, in which the word ‘Download’ is drawn.

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SEO comes before translation

August 12th, 2008 Amir

Search Engine Optimization is not witchcraft. It’s just letting search engines understand your website.

When you translate your website, you’re actually duplicating its contents in multiple languages. So, it’s a good idea to fix it up before doing that. The first major fixup you should do is to make your site clearer for search engines – the fancy name for this is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

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Character Encoding 101

August 12th, 2008 Amir

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All English characters can be represented using a single byte. So, if all your text is in English, you probably never needed to pay much attention to what’s called “character encoding”.

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