Table of Contents
A readable website is a website where visitors feel comfortable in looking through information. It needs to be clean, concise and easy on the eyes. Will all of the rush to register domain names, organise shopping carts and get the website up and running, it’s easy to forget the importance of making sure that your content looks good and is easy to read. However this can make a huge difference to the experience your potential customers have when they visit your website. Here, we’ve got a great list of tips to ensure that your web copy is easy to read and looks great too:
Don’t over do it
Cramming pages with lots of text and images can not only look messy, but it’s hard to digest. Make sure that you have a good balance between white space and text, and create points and paragraphs accordingly so that the information doesn’t look like one big clump on the page.
Font choices
One common mistake that people make when writing the pages for their website is using complicated or hard to read fonts. Use simple fonts that are easy to read, such as Arial text. You also don’t want to have a number of different fonts used throughout the website. Stick to 2 fonts, 3 at a push.
Keep it simple
If the text needs to be the key focus of your website avoid using heaps of different design elements that will distract attention away from the written copy.
Use points and lists as much as possible
Information is much easier to digest in small pieces. Where possible, create lists or break information up into several points.
Background colours
If you are tempted to use fluoro pink as the background colour of your web pages think again. Keep the colours simple so that the text is able to stand out against the background and the reader doesn’t have to strain to be able to read the content.
Some things to avoid:
- Using italics- Italics are particularly hard to read especially when in a smaller text size so use it sparingly if you have to.
- Don’t overuse capitals- Capital letters in body content or used for entire headings are difficult to read.
Are your pages easy to scan?
This is an important question you need to ask yourself. People searching on the internet are not likely to take the time to read every paragraph in length. They are more than likely going to scan the page for the information they are looking for. In order to make it easy for people to scan you should:
- Organise information into lists (as discussed earlier)
- Create lots of headings
- Begin each paragraph with the most important information you want to communicate
When you are starting up your own online business it’s easy to focus heavily on getting the website up and running, and letting the quality of the content go to the wayside. There can be too much focus on researching dedicated servers and payment options for customers and not enough focus on creating readable content. But the fact is, this is one of the most important elements to consider to ensuring your website’s success.