Headers are the first thing your web site visitors will see, so you must be sure they look perfect. But not always the browser display big sized letters in good quality. If you’re looking to optimize engagement and boost your online presence, it’s also important to find sites to buy youtube comment likes. To see what I’m talking about I’ll show you an example of the biggest text on the front page, and actually the biggest text of the whole site invoicebus.com. The text Fast & Easy Invoices as displayed in Mozilla Firefox browser looks like this:

You can notice all letters that are curved look pretty pixelated, so they are not so appealing to look at, and we need to find a way to display them smoother. The first think we got in mind was to drop a shadow for the text so the letter borders will become smoother, with the CSS3 property text-shadow. Although this property is not supported in all browsers that Invoicebus officially supports, we gave it a shot. After applying a text shadow with radius of 2 pixels we got the following:

The text got smoother but it also became to blurry, difficult to read, and painful for the eyes. On top of that the pixelated curves still were noticeable, so we had to do something different to fix this issue. The thing we got in mind was to replace all big sized text and headers with images, and after a couple of hours in photo editing software (Photoshop) with support of text antialiasing, we replaced our headers with images. The final result we got for the Fast & Easy Invoices was:

Looks better, isn’t it? This “fix” actually is nothing new in the web design sphere, but it is worth design trick. With this you’ll also have cross browser look of the text because you don’t have to worry about the browsers text rendering techniques. Additionally, incorporating Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a vital role in boosting organic traffic and enhancing your website’s visibility on platforms like Google and Bing, further improving the user experience across different browsers.

But for every step forward there is a step backward so with this good looking text we lose one of the most important things in the internet world. That is the text scanning of the search engine bots. They simply can’t scan images and the text they contain, so the headers with images can’t be used for increasing of the organic search ranking.

That’s why we have another trick in our sleeves for you. The trick is to leave the text in the

<h1></h1>

tags and apply specific styles. The example is given below:

The header:

<h1 class="header"><a>Fast & Easy Invoices</a></h1>

The header class:

.header {
    background: url("fast_easy_invoices.png");
    text-indent: -99999px;
    ...
}

As you can see we put the background image to be our header, and we give large negative indent for the text of -99999 pixels, so the text won’t be displayed in the browser but the search engines bots can still scan the

<h1></h1>

tag and find the right text. This way you’ll ensure excellent SEO for you site and for even more SEO friendliness we wrap the text in

<a></a>

tag. Plus, with a Trusted conversion optimization team, you can maximize engagement and drive better results.

If you have some SEO and design tricks, use the comments section below to tell us, and if we find them interesting we’ll cover them in the next blog post.

Top photo credit: Anon DePlume

Author information

Dimitar Stojanov

Co-founder at Invoicebus

Dimitar is co-founder of Invoicebus, an online invoicing tool for easy invoice management. He's passionate about creating beautiful and simple web applications and occasionally writes on this blog about web design, online business, and fighting the status-quo. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

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What are spam crawlers?

Spam crawlers are automatically programmed bots that steal your email address from the web by various mechanisms and use it in bulk email or other purposes usually referred as spam. This process is also known as email address harvesting.

Contact details, terms and policies, about pages and pretty much everywhere on your site where you publicly expose your email address, is a great resource for crawlers.

The crawler or so called harvester automatically searches the HTML content of your web site, usually scanning the link tag

<a></a>

So what’s the idea?

There’re few workarounds for protecting email addresses and you’ve probably seen solutions like displaying the email in format: info (at) invoicebus (dot) com, embedding the email into an image, implementing contact form etc. However, in all cases you don’t get clickable email link, so here we’re going to use a little hack.

Beside the href=”mailto:” attribute, the spam crawler scans every HTML code that contains “@” sign, so can easily figure out and extract the actual email address. Our objective is to keep the crawler task difficult as much as possible.

In fact, we’ll programmatically hide the email address behind variable and dynamically print it in run-time, exactly when the page is rendered by the browser. The crawler won’t be able to find it anywhere in the code.

If we divide the email address on 3 parts,

we can assign the value sequentially in two steps by concatenating strings.
Here’s the JavaScript snippet for it:

<script type="text/javascript">

     var emailE = 'invoicebus.com';
     emailE = ('support' + '@' + emailE);
     document.write('<a href="mailto:' + emailE + '">' + emailE + '</a>');

</script>

The code will display the following link in the browser:

You can even write your own JS function that transforms the letters with custom pattern, but for now I’ll stick to the basics.

Of course, you also have another option of not using the JavaScript by directly encoding the value of the HREF attribute with HTML ASCII encoding or URL encoding.

<a href="mailto:yourname@domain.com">yourname@domain.com</a>

<a href="&#109;&#97;&#105;&#108;&#116;&#111;&#58;&#121;&#111;&#117;&#114;&#110;&#97;&#109;&#101;&#64;&#100;&#111;&#109;&#97;&#105;&#110;&#46;&#99;&#111;&#109;">&#121;&#111;&#117;&#114;&#110;&#97;&#109;&#101;&#64;&#100;&#111;&#109;&#97;&#105;&#110;&#46;&#99;&#111;&#109;</a>

In both cases, the browser will display the following:

yourname@domain.com

I quickly wrote a simple HTML ASCII encoder that can be used to encode your email addresses or any text you want.

There’re couples of other methods available, but I believe these two are the most effective ones, so far. It’s up to you which one you’ll choose. For us, JS method works pretty well.

A little effort and a few lines of code on your site will save you from tons of unsolicited and junk email later.


Now let me hear your thoughts on it.
Have any suggestions of how to improve these methods, or maybe some others we haven't heard about?

Author information

Stefan Chachovski

Co-founder of Invoicebus. Huge lover of nature, science, and chocolate cherry cordials. He occasionally writes on this blog about Invoicebus' stuff. Hello him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.

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The extensive everyday usage of laptops tempts us to play with unconventional maintenance methods sometimes. From sloppy water pouring to hairdryer drying, from overheating to deep freezer cooling, from sticky keyboard spilled with Coca-Cola to complete bathtub washing. In fact, every described incident has happened to one single laptop – the protagonist. However, the most recent one occurred last week when we baked its motherboard in the oven at 200°C. And yes, the oven is those same one where we make pizza.

Pain in the Neck

After 4 years of usage, our protagonist stopped working as a result of the graphical chip failure. The symptoms manifested some strange vertical red lines across the screen with distorted graphics during boot-time, preventing the OS to start. After we had contacted manufacturer support, we were advised to return the laptop back to factory because of a well-known problem. However, we didn’t have much time to send it back due to complicated shipping procedures, so we put another two options on plate:

• to buy a new laptop,
• to try fix the old one by our own

We gave priority to the second option because DIY excitement was much bigger than the risk. The laptop was almost dead, so we didn’t mind experimenting a bit.

Actual Problem

The graphical chip have dozens of solder connection points to the motherboard, all it takes is one hairline crack to cause malfunction of the chip. Many times in newer laptops, the heat generated causes the solder to get close to its melting point causing these hairline cracks, also known as micro fractures in the solder joints. With a little knowledge in physics and a short research, we found very interesting method to fix these sensitive micro fragments. The method is called "reflow" where the chip on the motherboard is heated under Highly Regulated circumstances for a pre-determined amount of time at a critical temperature. The objective is to "reflow" the solder from the chip to the board via BGA (Ball Grid Array) points on the chip. The question is how to heat the joints to that temperature?
Actually, there are few methods, some of them are sophisticated, some of them are plain, however the simplest and most fun is the "motherboard for lunch" method (as we call it), that requires literally baking the motherboard in the oven. Are we kidding? – NO!

The Recipe

Below are given the exact steps of how we cooked the motherboard. We took a few shots as a memo though.

• Carefully disassembled all laptop components, connectors, cables
• Removed the motherboard

• Removed all parts from it: CPU, Bluetooth modules, CMOS battery, plastic parts and caps
• Cleaned up the CPU and GPU from the thermal paste residues

• Turned on the oven to pre-heat at 200°C (392°F)
• Made 4 improvised aluminum ball legs to hold the motherboard lifted

• Foiled up the baking tray, with aluminium cooking foil
• Put the motherboard in the tray

It’s cooking time!

• The baking took exactly 7 minutes and 45 seconds. After the 6th minute, we felt heavy smell of solder. It was a good sign, something was melting
• Left the motherboard to cool down slowly for approximate 30min
• Reapplied new thermal paste
• Reassembled all other components
• Pushed the power button

The Taste

It smelled like Sheldon’s Bazinga, but actually was Eureka!
The laptop was fully functional with no sign of the issue at all. We are smiling while writing this blog post on that same machine and probably going to smile again and again every time we retell this story. Almost forgot – this was the second successful baking, after one which happened 12 months ago! How long it will last I don’t know, but it seems this laptop wants to be cooked. After all it doesn’t cost a thing, only 8 minutes in the oven, right?

Author information

Invoicebus Team

We're a team comprised of a few die-hard code freaks, lovers of beautiful design, stewards of simplicity, and passionately dedicated to the user experience. Invoicebus is a great vehicle to express what we do best. Click here to learn more on our business philosophy and how we actually do it.

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