Well, the title may be an overstatement, as there are worse fonts out there. But none seem to be so abused as Comic Sans. Once you get to know it’s signature lines and curves, you see it absolutely everywhere.

That in itself should be reason enough not to use it. If you want your message to stand out from the crowd, try using a font that’s different to what everyone else uses.

It’s harder to read than most other common fonts, and from a design perspective, it’s bad news unless you’re under 12 year of age.

A very under used element of HTML 5 is <odor>, which allows the user to sense smell through the browser.

This innovative feature of HTML is used widely by the perfume industry, allowing customers to sample the fragrances before purchasing. But it is all but ignored by the rest of the web, which is unfortunate as it can also be used to good effect on many other websites.

An obvious example is the online florist. Even though a photo is often enough for the customer to make a choice, give them a waft of rose or carnation while browsing to enhance the buying experience.

Online car showrooms can feature that ‘new car’ smell, restaurants can tempt visitors to their site with the aroma of fresh baked bread, and department stores can add baby smell to the baby goods section of their websites.

A whole new online industry is waiting to be developed in the aromatherapy field, with practitioners able to treat their patients online.

To help encourage it’s use, I am going to outline the specification in this article, and provide some examples.

Element

<odor>

Attributes

type

The type attribute specifies the type of odor. If using an older browser without the latest infinite odor specifications, such as Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape 4, provide a fallback to one of the basic 7 odor types.

The 7 basic odor types are:

• musky
• putrid
• pungent
• camphoraceous
• ethereal
• floral
• pepperminty

Intensity

The intensity attribute types determine the strength of the odor, with the default value being distinct.  The 7 intensity attributes are:

• no-odor
• very-weak
• weak
• distinct
• strong
• very-strong
• intolerable

Examples

<p>What's in a name? that which we call a <odor type="rose, floral" intensity="distinct">Rose</odor><br>By any other name would smell as sweet.</p>

<p><odor type="grass, ethereal" intensity="strong"><img src="lawn.jpg" alt="Freshly mowed lawn"></odor></p>

<table>
<tr>
<th>Lunch Menu</th><th>Price</th>
</tr>
<td><odor type="fried-food, musky" intensity="weak">Steak and Chips</odor></td><td>$19.95</td>
</tr>
</tr>
<td><odor type="wet-garden, camphoraceous" intensity="strong">Caeser Salad</odor></td><td>$14.95</td>
</tr>
</tr>
<td><odor type="sugar, pepperminty" intensity="very-strong">Ice Cream Sundae</odor></td><td>$9.95</td>
</tr>
</table>


Caution: setting the intensity to intolerable and the type to putrid may cause users to fall unconscious while visiting your website.

Contact Arrowsmith Websites to enquire about enhancing your website with smells.

Everyone uses Google to search, but are you being efficient and getting the best results? Here are some tips you can use to increase your search productivity:

Leave out small words like the, or and of unless it is part of a title or famous phrase, like to be or not to be. Searching for how long is a piece of string achieves mostly the same result as how long piece string.

Searches are case insensitive. So searching for fred, Fred and FRED will deliver the same result.

To search for an exact phrase or sequence of words, enclose it in double quotes. Searching for engaging online educational resource brings up amazon.com, whereas “engaging online educational resource” brings up something altogether different!

Lastly, to see how many pages of your website are in Google’s database, prefix your website address with ‘site:’ like this site:www.yourwebsite.com.