tales from the central european web

Sunday, June 04, 2006

Interesting characters in title: ۩۝ இ ண █ ☻ ♪ ♫ ﬗ۝

There are a lot of interesting characters outside the ASCII range which can be used either as a decoration element on a web page, or even better as a decoration of the page title or description. If these "weird" (sorry for being politically incorrect) characters show up among the search engine results, chances are high that the entry will catch the readers' attention, thus generating higher click-thru rates. You can even use this in your contextual text advertisements for the same purpose. There are a lot of characters which can be displayed by most browsers even if no special character set is installed on your computer (like Chinese, Korean, Japanese, etc.).

UTF-8 characters in a single HTML file


As you might have noticed, I am also using one of these decorative characters on this site. I have generated a single html file where all the UTF-8 characters are listed so as to pick a new character quickly and easily.
  • Download the file from http://www.wideweb.hu/download/
  • Open it with Internet Explorer and other browsers, like Firefox
  • Use the ones which are displayed by most of the browsers you tried.