Web Design – 6 Ways to make your content more legible

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Web Design – 6 Ways to make your content more legible

18 May 2010 and last modified on May 26th, 2010 at 11:25 pm, No Comment

Professional Web Design focuses on a number of elements. Visually appealing design and quality of content are arguably the most important considerations. It is important to ensure your website adds value for visitors. Businesses today to offer a wide range of content on their website. Well planned information architecture together with quality content on the website plays an important role in determining long term success of your website. Whilst it is important for the content to promote your business and its services, offering additional information and resources for customers is equally important. Professional copy-written content contributes to a positive brand image and promotes customer loyalty. Content is also important for ranking higher on search engines.

Preparing content for your website is a time taking and continuous process. If the content is illegible or not edited properly, your website is unlikely to provide real benefits to the company. Professionally written content is the first step towards generating new business via your website. How the content is presented on the website will ultimately ensure its value.

Following are six easy ways to make the content of your website more legible for readers:

1. Format your text with CSS.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are used in all professional web design. CSS Styles control the way text looks on a website. Use of a common style sheet on all web pages adds consistency to the website and makes it easier to read. Use of style sheets also makes it easier to manage design changes if required. A single file can be updated to change the style across the website. Use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) also keeps the code clean and improves on search engine ranking.

2. Correct font size.

There are many sites where small font size makes the website difficult to read. When designing a website, it is important to consider your target audience and account for different screen resolutions. Higher resolution screens can often make the font appear smaller than lower resolution screens. It is also important to consider the different age groups of visitors. Certain age groups may find it difficult to read smaller fonts. In any case, the font size should not be too small. It is better to use 12-pt than 8-pt.

3. Contrast with background.

It is a common web design practice to use contrast between the text and colour of the background. If the background is dark, the text should be of a light colour and vice versa. This makes the text easier to read. The more contrast, the better. Black text on a white background is a perfect example.

4. Correct space between lines.

Using the right line space is equally important. If the line space is too less, lines of text can appear crammed. Increasing the line space on the other hand provides a neater way to represent multiple lines of text. It also makes long paragraphs easier to read. If line spacing is not specified in CSS, then the default single line spacing is used between lines. It helps to increase the line space which can be done easily using CSS styles.

5. Break text into chunks.

It is well known that Internet users tend to scan the content on a website. Readers scan the content from top to bottom as opposed to reading each and every word. Presenting text in blocks with the right heading s and sub-headings makes the content easier to scan. On the other hand, a single long paragraph of text without any breaks or sub-headings can be quite difficult to read. Use of bullet points or lists is also helpful.

6. Spelling and grammar.

A web page with spelling or grammatical errors is unprofessional and can damage your brand. Although it may seem obvious, this are is often overlooked by web masters. It is essential to ensure correct spellings are used and the content is free from any grammatical errors. There are many online spell check tools that can be used to automate this process. It is much easier to use a tool that check each page individually. Alternatively this can be done by via word processing software such as Microsoft Word.

As discussed in this article, it is fairly easy to ensure the content of your website is legible and easy to read. By following this simple checklist, you can improve the legibility of your website. This will in-turn improve your credibility among visitors.

RESOURCES:

Web Design Company, London

Joomla Development

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