Websites that make their customers work to read them are
not the best way to get business. Miniscule fonts, text in colors that
make it hard to see against the background, and lines that are piled on
top of each other are problems, but they?re easy to correct. Let?s jump
right in and look at five easy fixes:
1. Format your text using CSS, not Font tags.
Cascading
Style Sheets (CSS) are the way to go ? use one style sheet and control
how text looks on your entire site. Make a change to the style sheet
and your whole site is updated. It makes life a lot simpler.
2. Make the font size big enough to read.
Consider
your target audience. Even if they are a group of teenage girls looking
for new shoes, it?s very rarely a good idea to use tiny type. It
doesn?t have to be enormous, but up to a point, larger type is better.
11-pt Verdana is nearly always a better choice than 8-pt Verdana.
3. Make the text contrast with its background.
The
more contrast, the better. Black-on-white or white-on-black are
examples of the highest contrast you can achieve. Use colors if you
like, but if you squint at the page and your text more or less
vanishes, there?s not enough contrast.
4. Give the lines room to breathe.
Don?t
stack lines on top of each other. Use the line-spacing feature in CSS
and give them some space; I?ll typically set line-spacing to 130% or
140% of the height of a typical line.
5. Break text up into chunks.
No
matter how good a writer you are, people don?t want to read endless
pages of text. Break it up by using headlines that reflect the subject
of the paragraph(s) to follow so people can scan down to the parts that
really interest them, or use bulleted lists to change the pace of the
writing and slow down the scanning.
And finally (not one of the 5 Easy Ways to Improve Legibility but still quite important) check your spelling.
Few things are more irritating on a web page than spelling errors ?
they simply make you look like you don?t care enough to get it right.
Use that ubiquitous spellcheck tool.
Making your website?s
content more legible is easy. It doesn?t take a lot of time, just
common sense. The payoff will be text that?s more readable, customers
that stick around long enough to get your message, and improved
credibility with your visitors.
Copyright 2006, Debbie A Campbell
Debbie A Campbell is a web developer of 11 years and the owner of Parallax Web Design (http://www.parallaxwebdesign.com).
Debbie is passionate about CSS, valid coding and web standards. She
creates and redesigns websites for small businesses and encourages her
clients to get involved with their customers via their site ? launch is
the beginning, not the end!
