Practical Ways to Improve Website Readability
A readable website will encourage your viewers to remain on your website longer and investigate your content further. Perhaps they will even come back and maybe share your website with their friends. The alternative, unfortunately, is an unreadable website to which viewers get annoyed and promptly leave, never to return. Here are some easy ways to avoid this catastrophe and make your website more readable.
Keep your pages clean.
Do not try to stuff your pages with unnecessary junk. Image backgrounds, flashing ads, and pop up distractions to ruin the point of the page. Instead, use a solid contrasting background and font. Keep entire viewing experience will be much improved with fewer distractions.
Stick to the standard.
When someone picks up a brochure to browse, they look inside for the bulk of the text and on the back for contact information. Just as with brochure printing, websites need to contain certain elements to be more readable. To vary from the standard usually means to confuse and irritate viewers. Therefore, always make your or both. In addition, do not make any other text blue or underlined. Place the site map at the top of the page and the contact, terms, conditions, and other similar
Make the format simple.
Do not use frames since these take longer to load, in addition to a number of other problems. Keep your text blocks small, and separate chunks of text with bullets and subheads. Another way to separate text chunks is to write many small paragraphs. Your text width should also be kept small, about 600 pixels wide, so create columns if need be. By breaking up your text, you will make reading more inviting.
Organize your site well.
A great navigational menu can be a lifesaver. Make sure that your front page looks like a front page. Also, keep the basic format, headers, footers, menus, and such the same on every page so that everything is easy to find.
Use text that is easy to read.
Avoid tiny fonts and if possible make your text scalable so that your viewer can choose the size for themselves. Sans-serif and plain text rather than italics are easier to read. Keeping your text consistent will also help. This means you need to avoid using multiple styles of font and bold or italic fonts.
Creating a website with better readability is a gift to your viewers and a smart business move. Take a little bit of time to make sure that your site is readable and you will see much better results with your website.
