Ok, my first post on this forum.... im a software engineer by trade so be gentle, im no web designer by any stretch!!

Im building myself a website for my new photography business, heres the URL

http://www.dreamoutloud.co.uk

Its not finished yet, need more photos and imagery on the site in general but my main question is regarding using graphics for text as i have done in a few of the sections on the site. Pros and cons to me are

Pros

• Looks better to 90% of users (ones that dont require accessibility features such as large text etc i guess)

Cons

• Doesnt work with screen readers
• Wont work with search engine spiders etc (major problem i guess)

OK, so my main question i suppose is how to get the site to have nice looking text as well as it being searchable by the crawlers. Is there some way i can keep the text as images as well as having some kind of text in the background (are alt tags picked up).

How about formatting fonts to look better using CSS, are there any nifty tricks available to help me get something similar to my preferred font (GilSans) with the small caps effect.

Thanks in advance

Mark

but my main question is regarding using graphics for text as i have done in a few of the sections on the site.

Since accessibility is the law in the UK, you really should steer away from the image for text scenario. It's also better to use real text other reasons - like search engines.

One method you might be interested in is sIFR. It uses a bit of flash to replace the text, with Flash. The text is REPLACED, which means screen readers and search engines will see the text as text. It's fairly easy to implement and there are sources for flash-ified fonts so you don't have to have flash to do this.

http://wiki.novemberborn.net/sifr