Text is very important and getting it right can make or break a website.

The art of typography can be quite in-depth but I'll try and give a few pointers to at least help with the 'correct etiquette' regarding the placement of text and headings etc.

Legibility
This is crucial, if the reader cannot read the text or finds it difficult, they won't read, so what's the point in putting any text on the web page?
People tend to see text in patterns before they see the text, they see the structure and contrast of the page and if it follows a familiar format they are more likely to read what you want to say.
There are a few elements to text that really help to make it legible. The use of Fonts, how Margins assist text to co-exist with the rest of the page, Headings and the correct placement and of course the content itself. All of these things must exist to create text in harmony with its surroundings.

Alignment
Do I Justify, Centre, Left justify or Right justify?
well you could do a bit of all of them but I guarantee you it won't look pretty. Blocks of justified text can create 'rivers' paths of white space that stand out within the text and turn text into a map of the Mississippi. Centre? well it all comes down to how you read and if you have uneven edges at the start it makes it harder to read, same goes for right justified text although I've never really found a convincing reason to ever use right justified text, so that leaves good old left justified and as we read from left to right in the western world it seems a good place to start.
As a rule of thumb, whatever your block of text is justified as so should your headings, its all to do with that predictable thing I was talking about earlier.


Line length
Something most people will never consider is the length of a text line... why? well who really cares? good web designers and typographers certainly do, long lines of text are awkward to read, have you ever wondered why books are the size they are?
well, to read one actually narrows one's vision to a focus point, that focus is about 3-4 inches; (I bet you've just measured a book page haven't you lol!)
To test this get some text and make one paragraph long say 800 pixels and the other about 400 pixels wide, now read and see which you find more comfortable.

Whitespace
The vertical bits between text, the standard nowadays for indicating a new paragraph is a blank line; as I am doing in this post, but it could also be done using indents, so one would indent the first line of a paragraph to indicate its beginning.

Typeface/Font
Knowing what to use and when is a tough question to answer, a lot of the typefaces used today were originally designed for print not screen a case in point is Times New Roman (TNR), although there are some typefaces designed for web/screen use, verdana, tahoma are just two of them. Using TNR isn't a bad thing especially if people are going to print out the text, it really depends on how the text is going to read. This section is too big to discuss fully so I'm leaving it at that for now.

Type Size
This is subject but important, because getting this right also helps with the display of the webpage. Windows default ppi is 96 while on a mac its 72ppi this doesn't seem to important until you start to use smaller fonts, on a windows system the text would be readable but on a mac it would probably be unreadable. That could cut a lot of readers out of the loop, not really a good idea. Type size is measured in points in most programs, although there are other options like em and pixel, most people will understand what '12 point font' means.

Emphasis
How to emphasise text, I always stay away from the underline, mainly because people get it confused with web links, italics offer a distinction, listing books within text is a good use of italics. Bold text is best used for headings and subheadings. Coloured text is another awkward choice, staying away from the weblink defaults of blue and violet help to distinguish its reason for use although again I think it's power is minimal for emphasis, due to the readers potential for thinking its a link.
Capital letters are not really an acceptable emphasis, and can actually be seen as 'shouting' this is a perceived action as viewed by most internet savvy users.

Spacing and indentation are good ways to emphasis text, look at bulleted text for an example of indented emphasis.

There is more to all of this and the sections could be a lot more detailed but I just wanted to give you some idea of how text could be formatted to give the reader a better experience.

My brain has gone dead now so I'll stop typing


Lee

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