One of the biggest ways to turn away would-be buyers, return visitors or RSS subscribers is unreadable content; content is king, at least in the eyes of visitors.
Font-size, content block, line-height, background/text contrast are all ways that could either help or hurt content readability.
- Font-size should always be set in either em’s or %s, never in pixels. A large portion of internet users still do not have modern browsers which can increase pixels from within their own browser; whereas all modern browsers can increase em’s and %’s.
- All main content should be able to be read on 800×600 screen resolutions within all browsers.
- The minimum line-height one should use is 1.3em’s (130%) within all main content. Although this could easily be argued depending on which font is used, 1.3em is generally the bare minimum. More times than not I end up using around 1.5em’s.
- Background/text contrast is a bit of a no-brainer; however, many first-timers don’t understand the concept to its fullest. Although black (I prefer #333 or #474747) on white is generally the best, there are times when colors need to be used (like headers, banners, footers). One thing to remember here is just because you can see it, others might not be able to.
- Check your website in Firefox, Safari, Opera and IE 6.0 and 7.0 (at least). Make changes to anything that looks funky–more times than not Firefox, Safari and Opera will look the same, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. Supporting IE is where the frustration begins, since it doesn’t support web standards. However, it is just something that must be done.
Although doing these will help create better readability, there are still ways it can be improved.
Now that the content is readable, the goal is to get your visitors to actually read it. As we all know, internet users are known scan-readers–they simply just don’t read, they scan the text. That is why <strong> and <em> are great ways to get your visitors to read certain sections; they stop our eyes and make us think “Oh! That must be important, it is in bold or italics!”. It’s human nature to stop and read at least a few sentences from each stoppage point.
Something which has been discussed within webmaster forums is the width of the <div> or <table> which the main content resides. Some theories suggest that just 10-15 words should fit within each line for complete readability. Although I don’t subscribe to this theory, I certainly agree there is a point to which a site designer must stop and think “Is this line too long for someone to move their eyes back and forth across?”.
Written: Sep 16, 2007
Tags: content, visitors
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