I’ve been thinking about a WordPress theme where you let a connected image (one of the images uploaded to a certain post) replace the textual content on the page, while still displaying the text in the html code.
The idea came up today when David and I where looking through Mirande July’s image driven site for her new book No one belongs here more than you. Her site hides all p text, while blowing up images tagged with the ID slide to 100% of both height and width of the available browser window.
Here’s the css code she uses:
* { margin: 0; padding: 0; border: 0; outline: 0; }
html, body, p, #slide { height: 100%; width: 100%; }
body { font-family: verdana, arial, sans-serif; color: #000; overflow: hidden; }
a { text-decoration: none; color: #000; }
#nav { position: absolute; right: 10px; bottom: 10px; list-style-type: none; width: 200px; height: 60px; }
#nav li, #nav li a { font-weight: bold; font-size: 40px; height: 60px; line-height: 60px; width: 100px; display: block; color: #ea008b; text-align: center; }
#nav a:hover { color: #000; }
#prev { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; }
#next { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 100px; }
#content { position: absolute; left: -9999px; }
That css code is of course almost useless for picky search engines such as Google, since it states that certain elements, such as the body content should be hidden by default. Not a good idea. It would be very possible to show them by default and then set them to display: false with a javascript at loading time.
Remember, I would never do that to game Google or any other search engine. The image would have to have the very same content as the hidden text.
I think I’ll try it on my Daily photo site at http://200.se/daily-photo/. That site was never really meant to rank in search engines anyway.
We have already started the development. I’ll post here (and here, here and here) when we are done.
Now, the SE angle can seem far fetched for for some people, but searchability is very important to me. It is, after all, what I make my living from. I write a lot about it in Swedish, and those of you who can read Swedish and have an interest will find more of my views on this under sökmotoroptimering and sökbarhet.
