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I'm not applying any text on my website. All the infos are embedded in images. Mainly because I had trouble incorporating the fonts needed for the site. Is it gonna be bad for search engines to get my site in the list of result? What can I do to rectify this without typing the contents on the site?

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faerismAsksAlot
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3 Answers3

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It's a bad idea, for indexing, usability, accessibility and maintainability.

These days you can render text on the web with any font using typeface.js:

http://typeface.neocracy.org/fonts.html

or send fonts straight to the browser using @font-face in CSS:

How do I use .woff fonts for my website?

Other things to consider:

  • You will break copy+paste for your users. Perhaps they want to copy the phone number or email address from your contact page?
  • What about the impact on non-desktop browsers, perhaps with smaller screens, that may not lay the page out as you expect?
  • What about users at high resolutions, who may want to zoom your web page for better visibility? With vector objects such as text, this works fine, but with images, it is going to appear pixelated and ugly.
  • What if you decide to change the color of your body text? With images you will have to re-render new images for every page of your website. Done properly with html+css, you only have to change a single value in a single file to achieve the same.

To me it feels fundamentally contrary to the ethos of the web.

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Mike Chamberlain
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    And because it will have horrible performance to use images for all the text. – tvanfosson Jan 25 '13 at 04:30
  • I don’t think all images is a completely horrible idea since fonts can replace handwritten text or images in all cases. A good `alt` strategy can compensate. – Giacomo1968 Jan 25 '13 at 04:31
  • When I see a website that uses all images for text, that will be the first and last time I visit. Almost as horrible as doing the whole thing in Flash. – Mike Chamberlain Jan 25 '13 at 04:37
  • Well, I somewhat agree but the crux of the question is not aesthetics, but the impact on SEO & even simple searchability. I think if it’s done well, then it’s fine. – Giacomo1968 Jan 25 '13 at 05:03
  • Thanks. I've never really considered those point of views. – faerismAsksAlot Jan 25 '13 at 06:40
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It will honestly mean your site does not get indexed. But if you want to have your content indexed, you must add alt content to all of your images.

Giacomo1968
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  • Thank you. I suppose the contents made using alt would be indexed, replacing text? – faerismAsksAlot Jan 25 '13 at 06:32
  • Alt text like this would help the image's be indexed, so people could find your site on Google - but suggesting this will work as a real solution for SEO is just not correct. – tim.baker Jan 25 '13 at 09:45
  • I think the original poster understands that `alt` is not a complete solution to SEO, but the original poster seems to understand there is a tradeoff to an all image design. And why `alt` text is not a perfect solution, it is much better than absolutely nothing. – Giacomo1968 Jan 25 '13 at 17:30
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Using images instead of fonts is not a good practice. You can use CSS font face or else use Google Web Fonts...

http://www.google.com/webfonts

But this web fonts may have some problem in IE.

It is better to use @font-face.

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