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sIFR Text is Stylin'

We recently implemented a new website for LPL Financial, one of our Ingeniux OnDemand customers. We used sIFR text for headlines. If you do not know about sIFR, it is time to learn. sIFR is in a word, "Stylin'..."

What do you do when a customer comes to you and say's their corporate style-guide requires using a non web-standard font for headlines? And you know the golden rule for search engine optimization, accessibility, and ease of content management is to keep headlines as text - not images. The answer, sIFR.

Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) is a little known web publishing approach that uses JavaScript to replace text with Adobe Flash content. This happens dynamically based on the detection of a Flash player. The amazing part is that to a search engine spider or a text reader the text appears as text - it may be crawled and indexed by search engine and is fully accessible. To a website visitor the text is presented as a highly stylized image.

We have been doing this with Flash for awhile. For instance the home page of Ingeniux's corporate website uses Flash but all of the content is XHTML stored in a div tag, thus we can ensure that the great keyword rich content we have in the Flash movie gets indexed by Goolge and meets accessibility guidelines. We can also update the text and images in Ingeniux CMS. But we have never used Flash for headlines until now.

What I really like about sIFR is that is 100% manageable within Ingeniux CMS. Ingeniux is XML. Flash reads XML. Presto. With sIFR Ingeniux CMS users can manage their headlines and other stylized text right in the edit form as regular content. We can create "navigations" from the headlines, edit the text, and manage it like any other content.

If you care about SEO, accessibility, and need to use stylized text treatments that cannot be met by CSS I would definitely recommend sIFR. Whether you are an eMarketer driven by SEO or a unversity or government that needs to meet 508a guidelines, sIFR is a great option.

If you want to learn more about sIFR you need to read this post on Mike Industries (perhaps my favorite blog): sIFR 2.0: Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses. To see LPL Financial's use of siFR with Ingeniux CMS view a detail page on LPL Financial's website.

Posted by David Hillis