Changing Font Size Mid-Word

Will making the first letter of a word a larger font, render it "unreadable

[Watcher of the Skies]

Hi, perhaps a silly question but here goes. I have a word where I want the first letter to be in a larger font than the rest of the word. Like this:

...font size="+4">W</font>idget Experts...

Will doing this hurt, in any way, the reading of the word WIDGET by a search engine (particularly G)? Would I rank well as an "idget Expert" instead? Or will it be read ignoring the HTML? Since the font size MAY been an indicator of a word's importance, I would assume the engines might delimit by that and therefore read "W" and "idget". Any ideas? Thanks.

[victor]

If this google search is anything to go by, then html within a word is not a problem:

"kids" site:www.dmoz.org

(the word kids on the DMOZ home page is broken up by several changes of color, but still seems to be taken as a single word)

[grahamstewart]

<font> tags are soooo 1990 :)
Have you considered using CSS instead?

This CSS will make the first letter of every paragraph big and bold.

p:first-letter { 
  font-size:180%; 
  font-weight:bold; 
} 

[Watcher of the Skies]

Thanks, I'll try the CSS option. Obviously, I'm no programmer or designer, but do have user friendly sites that make me a lot of money. From that perspective, it doesn't even pay to rid a site of dozens of <div> tags, nested tables, and triple-nested overwritten attribute tags just for the sake of looking nice - though i'm sure that comment will drive some of the more retentive here crazy. ;-) The pages work and are fast, doesn't slow down anyone 'cause no page is too big. Now, I could devote ten more minutes to doing CSS or a couple hours to doing Flash, and a few more to layers, ad nauseum. But it's not necessary. If/when I desire to be bigger and badder, I'll just pay someone to do it. :-)

[grahamstewart]

Fair enough - you could use CSS to make your pages rank better and load faster, as well as hugely cutting down the amount of time you spend doing maintenance.

But it's up to you... :)

[Watcher of the Skies]

My best site has 30,000 pages, no maintenance necessary - I get it right the first time (really), from good templates which I DO spend time getting right. Load faster? Already addressed that - small and fast pages anyway. Rank better? Has ZERO to do with it. Not trying to be argumentative, just would rather hang at the beach and buy cars than clean code which works already. My time is valuable. :)