Text vs images

[AusQB]

I find that it's hard to get text and images to blend well aesthetically, particularly if you're designing a more stylish website.

My solution of course is to simply render the text as part of the image, the obvious drawback of which is that it leaves no content for search engines to analyze.

Is this such a big issue? Shouldn't the meta tags (description, keywords) be sufficient?

 

[DustyDesert]

You could add some css for the caption text so it looks nicer. An alternative to text under the image, or in addition to, you could add it to the image tag so it shows when the cursor is hovered over the image. You could put the caption and/or title in the img tag as: (img src="imageURL" title="description here" alt="description here") , then it will work in most browsers and is searchable. The meta tag for keywords isn't very useful anymore, but still worth using. Just don't count on it to do much for SEO.

 

[conor]

Meta tags only work if their content is present somewhere in the content of the website so yes it does matter. But you can get around this by using the alt and title tags as described above.

But why use images if you can use text. I only use images for stuff like the website title. All my links are styled with CSS which makes it way easier to create pages - you don't have to go back and keep making images! Images will become a problem when using a CMS also, unless you wan't to write a program which generates images for you!

Text is also way faster than images in terms of processing times.

 

[darksoul32]

Don't do that! That is a big mistake. Use CSS to make the text look nicer.