5 Easy Ways to Improve Your Website's Legibility
Making websites easy to read help customers to navigate around your website easier and makes new visitors feel more at home. Small fonts, hard to read text against darker backgrounds and images all over the place make your website harder to navigate, read and most importantly gives off a bad impression for a new visitor.
These common problems are easy to correct however, so lets look at some easy to implement ways of improving your sites legibility.
1. Format your text using CSS.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) seperates your websites design from it's content. Using one style sheet you can control how your text looks in your entire site. It makes managing your site easy since you only have to make one change and your whole site is updated.
2. Make the font size big enough to read.
Consider your audience. It's never a good idea to use tiny type on your website, and it doesn't look good if your text is huge in comparison to the images. A 12-pt font such as Verdana or Arial means your visitors will be able to read your content easily.
3. Make the text contrast with its background.
More contrast, means easier to read text. Black-on-white or white-on-black are the highest contrast you can get. You can use colours by all means, but make sure that if you look at your site from a distance the contrast is high enough to make the text easy to read. If you struggle to read from a distance, then there is not enough contrast.
4. Give the lines room to breathe.
Don't stack lines on top of each other. Use the line-spacing directive in CSS and give it some space; I'll often set line-spacing to 140% of the height of a typical line.
5. Break text up into chunks.
No matter how good a writer you are, people don't want to read endless pages of text. Break it up by using headlines that reflect the subject of the paragraph(s) to follow so people can scan down to the parts that really interest them, or use bulleted lists to change the pace of the writing and slow down the scanning.
And finally (not one of the 5 Easy Ways to Improve Legibility but still quite important) check your spelling. Nothing irritates me more on a web page than spelling errors - it simply makes you look like you don't care enough to get it right. Use that ubiquitous spellcheck tool.
Making your website's content more legible is easy. It doesn't take a lot of time, mainly common sense. The payoff will be text that's more readable, customers that stick around long enough to get your message, and improved credibility with your visitors.