Font Size question

[Tomseys]

Ok, I use fp 2002 to make sites. For fonts sizes, it offers 1 through 7. The 6 font is too small for what I want to do (make a title at the top of the page) and the 7 font is way too large and looks bad in an 800 x 600 res. How can I define the font to be a little bigger than 6 (24 pt) but not quite as big as 7 (36 pts) in a way that will work across browsers? Ideally, I imagine a 30 pt font would probably be the right size. How can I express that? I only know basic html so please provide an example and be explicit if possible.

Thanks very much!

[Tomseys]

Lol, ok, I can just define it as 30pt. I got it.

Thanks.

[bill]

Don't define font sizes at all in FP...particularly point (pt) sizes. That will force FP to add <font> tags which will unnecessarily bloat your code. You might benefit from reading through our CSS Forum. There are a number of threads about text sizing that may enlighten you.

[Tomseys]

Hi. What is wrong with having bloated code?

Thanks.

[bill]

Cleaning up the bloat in your code can make your pages download faster for one... If you're interested in creating clean, validating code you'll soon find that a lot of people are using CSS instead of older depreciated tags like <font> to control page style.

[Tomseys]

I see. Well, my pages load very quickly. Is CSS easy to learn? There are no search engine ranking benefits to it are there?

[rogerd]

Tomseys, it seems to be generally true that lighter, leaner pages are better SE performers than pages that have lots of code compared to the amount of content. A site we worked on recently (designed by others) had pages where the spiderable text content was only about 4% of the total page - these weren't ranking well...

A few font tags won't tank your rankings, so there's no need to obsess. Nevertheless, if you get in the CSS habit, you will produce faster pages and also make changing the site design much faster. For example, imagine that you designed your site with many text elements at 10pt size. Then, after checking your site on a high-res monitor, you decide that 10pt is too small and want to increase it. If you are using an external style sheet, you can make one change and the entire site is adjusted; much faster than editing every page.

[Tomseys]

Ok. I'll check it out. Maybe I'll use that on my next site and then slowly convert the rest.

Thanks guys.