{"id":358565,"date":"2021-12-24T04:33:11","date_gmt":"2021-12-24T12:33:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/?p=358565"},"modified":"2021-12-24T04:33:13","modified_gmt":"2021-12-24T12:33:13","slug":"care-for-the-text","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/care-for-the-text\/","title":{"rendered":"Care for the Text"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
How do you make a great website? Everyone has an answer at the ready: Flashy animations! The latest punk-rock CSS trick! Gradients! Illustrations! Colors to pack a punch! Vite! And, sure, all these things might make a website better. But no matter how fancy the application is or how dazzling the technology will ever be under the hood, a great website will always require great text.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
So, whenever I\u2019m stuck pondering the question: \u201chow do I make this website better?\u201d I know the answer is always this: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
care for the text.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Without great writing, a website is harder to read, extremely difficult to navigate, and impossible to remember. Without great writing, it\u2019s hardly a website at all. But it\u2019s tough to remember this day in and day out\u2014especially when it\u2019s not our job to care about the text\u2014yet each and every So: care for the text. Got it. But there are so many ways to care! From commas and smart quotes, to labels in our forms, to typography, and even the placeholders in our inputs. It\u2019s a dizzying amount of responsibility\u2014but it\u2019s worth every second of our time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here\u2019s one example: a while ago, we needed to explain a new feature to our users and point to it in the UI. We could use our pop-up component to explain how our team just fixed something for a ton of folks\u2014but!\u2014I knew that no matter what the fancy new feature was, our customers would be annoyed by a pop-up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After thinking about it for far too long I realized that this was an opportunity to acknowledge how annoying this popup was:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/code> tag and
<button><\/code> element is an opportunity for great writing. It\u2019s a moment to inject some humor or add a considerate note that helps people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n