Best practices for screenshots

Cheryl - do you know if it a WordPress site? If so, someone in your company has permissions to change it. Redesigning your page/site could be very easy. Look at the bottom of your website for anything that states WordPress.

Thanks for the response, David. It's not a WordPress site. Our IT department built it. We've had a dozen people working on rebuilding it for months now. I'm helping them identify bugs but there's no way they're changing the design. 

Is the screen responsive at all? For example, if I'm visiting the actual page and narrow the width of my browser, does the text in the main section re-wrap in its own smaller width? That's a small step toward shorter line lengths (as in the center bottom of your example).

That can only take you so far. I think your arrow-and-zoom is probably a good way to draw attention to a particular section, if that's the goal.

If you're dealing with a process or a series of concepts, does it make sense to combine the zooms with (for instance) some preliminary highlights?  "Our service profiles include a description (highlight part A), a demo (part B), competitive strengths (part C), and tech details (part D). Let's look at those in order... (zoom to A)."

Dave, thank you for your good ideas. I think my problem arises from me reducing the font size so I can get all the text in one screenshot. That used to work until these revisions. 

This afternoon I increased the font size and used the All in One option in Snag It to capture the full (longer) page. Then I used a motion path to move the page up. The page is scrolling at the appropriate time during the narration, so users can scan the form and end with the bottom of the form. I'll see what my SMEs say when I send them the first draft. I don't know if this will always work but it seems adequate at the moment. Thanks again.

ps - it is responsive, yes. And I'm sure part of my problem is I don't have the skill level to know what size I should be capturing it at for my usual 4:3 setup. The font size improves when I make the window smaller, but that will force a lot of scrolling to show them top to bottom what the form looks like. I suppose I could set up a Camtasia screencast.

Cheryl, another thought: depending as always on the situation, could you turn your screen capture into a "click here to see the whole page" that would come up as a full-sized image? You've got your motion path and synchronization already; I'm just thinking of an optional "if you'd like to see (the page we're talking about), click here."

(As opposed to sending them out to the real site, which might not match whatever you want to talk about...)

That's a very interesting idea. I usually have them click on fields to get a description or something. That might be a much smoother option. I'll give that a try in the morning. Thank you, sir!