The home page of Yahoo! (Figure 3), the most popular search engine on the Web, is a good example of small graphical text. The site as a whole uses HTML text almost entirely, and is easy to read on both a television screen and a personal computer monitor. However, the navigation bar across the top of the home page is a graphic with text and images mixed together. On a personal computer monitor, the text is small and hard to read. On a television screen, the text is nearly impossible to read, as shown in the figure.

This is a common situation on many top-rated Web sites, not just Yahoo! -- though in most cases the navigation text is a little larger than on Yahoo!. On most sites the problem is compounded by the repeated use of the navigation bar on most of the site's pages.

Figure 3. Yahoo! home page on WebTV.

If your Web site has a navigation graphic with small, hard-to-read text on its home page, the best thing you can do to make your site more WebTV-friendly is to fix the navigation graphic. There are a few ways to do this that meet different needs you might have for your site:

• Make embedded text larger. Go back and revise the graphic that you use as a navigation bar so that the text embedded in it is large enough to work well on WebTV. The good news is that this may be a quick fix to make; a possible problem is that text large enough to work well on WebTV might be too large to look good on a PC.
  
  
• Use a browser sniffer. Use a browser sniffer to put a different graphic up for WebTV. The good news is that this lets you do the best thing for each separate platform; the bad news is that you have to implement and test the browser sniffer and also maintain two separate navigation graphics.
  
  
• Use an HTML navigation bar. You can use a small HTML table to create a navigation bar that looks like a graphic, but actually uses HTML text. The advantage of this is that WebTV can resize the text for television, making the text larger and readable on WebTV, but not affecting its size when displayed on a PC.

Note: Banner and button ads
Like navigation banners, many Web banner ads and ad buttons have small text embedded in them. This is understandable, given the limited space available for text in these ads, but often this small text is hard to read on personal computers as well as difficult or impossible to read on a television screen. If you're responsible for creating ads or selling ad space, consider creative ways to make sure that WebTV users as well as personal computer users can see and respond to your ad.