Expand Your Market By Improving Web Page Readability

The importance of a web site being easy to read was brought home to me through personal experience with my aging mother. As a hard core Internet junkie, I felt compelled to share the wonders of the Web with her. Unfortunately, her eyesight had diminished and reading on the Web was an unpleasant experience for her.

I literally became her human page reader and the Internet became a mother-daughter activity. Sometimes I'd copy and paste the text of articles into Word and kick up the font size to 16 to print them out so she could share articles with her senior friends who didn't have geeky daughters.

Reading on the web can be hard work for anyone, not just the elderly. Eye strain runs rampant in the online crowd. Numerous studies have shown that reading performance drops dramatically on the web.

Making your web pages more readable is smart. You not only expand your market potential by making your pages more accessible to more people, but many of the techniques that improve usability, make your pages more search engine friendly as well.

Improving your viewer's reading experience on your site is easy if you keep a few things in mind. Here are my favorite readability guidelines.

1. Use contrasting colors. Text is easiest to read when the font text color and the background color are in high contrast. Low contrast irritates the reader and causes eye fatigue. Viewers with impaired vision may not be able to read low contrast text at all.




2. "Chunk up" your copy. That's technical talk for make your page more scan-friendly. Large blocks of dense text intimidate the reader and cause "information overload." Look at the two pages below. Which one would you rather read?
   
   
   Here are a few easy ways to break up blocks of text:
   
   
   
   • Use bullets and subheadings. They help get the readers attention and say "Hey you - this is important!" Colored bullets are an easy way to add color and visual interest to a text heavy page. Subheadings should be brief and convey a summary of the section. Too often we're tempted to use clever titles whose meaning is lost on the reader.
   
   
   
   • Keep your paragraphs short. Breaking a long paragraph into several smaller sections invites the viewer in to read. A little white space between the paragraphs gives the site a clean look.
   
   
   
   • Impatient visitors want to be able to glance at your page and hit the important points. You can help them by bolding important points or highlighting the text in a different color to draw their eye.
   
   
   
   • Use columns to control text width. Your goal here is to avoid running your text all the way across the page. Pick up any newspaper. Notice how they place the text in columns. The shorter width makes the text easier to read.
   
   
   
3. Avoid busy backgrounds. Nothing screams "amateur" like a noisy background that makes your text impossible to read.






4. Less is better. Many sites look like my kitchen table - always cluttered with things that don't belong there. The more extraneous items you cram on a web page, the more you confuse and distract the visitor.

   Web sites take on an unprofessional look when you start tacking on too many items. From a search engine perspective, too many ideas can dilute the relevancy of your main content. Challenge every item on the page. Does it really need to be there? Is it still functional? Can I do without it?




5. Strive for a clean font style for maximum readability. Imagine trying to read a web page in the decorative style below. Compare that with the sans-serif font next to it.

SOURCE:http://www.keyrelevance.com/articles/readability.htm