A successful website not only draws visitors, but which keeps them there, and compels them to come back for more. All this talk about a website’s “stickiness” and “eyeballs” actually depends on how attractive is its design and informative its content.
If a website is designed to facilitate both information retrieval and browsing, it is bound to be noticed and surfed intensively. Visitors won’t be encouraged to go any further if they find what they are looking for in the website’s information-rich content, presented in a clear and lucid language and a pleasantly designed layout.
Web developers, in their attempt to provide affordable web design solutions, cut corners when it comes to content. Irrespective of whether they are based in advanced countries like UK, US or in developing countries, this is a typical practice of many web solution providers. To make space of large eye-catching banners, the font size may be made so small that it is virtually incomprehensible.
Moreover, you might find the text placed in colors that are similar to the ones used in the background, rendering it difficult to read. Affordable web design should not mean making compromises on the website’s usability. While these problems can kill any website, they can be fixed rather easily. Let’s see how:
1. Utilize CSS
Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) is a great tool to define and control the look and appearance of the text on the entire site. One change in the CSS and entire site is updated.
2. Make the font size legible
Not only should the font size make reading easy, it should also cater to the preferences of its target audience. For a serious corporate audience, crisp and professional looking 12 pt Verdana is just right, while if teenage girls are the primary target audience, Times New Roman should be the chosen font.
3. Text color should contrast with the background color.
Nothing is more frustrating for a visitor, if he/she can’t comprehend the text properly because of color similarity between the text color and background color. In fact usability of a website is directly proportional to its contrast. One good and simple measure of contrast is that when you squint your eyes, the text should not dim altogether. If it does, there is not enough contrast.
4. Don’t smash the lines together
Lines stacked on the top of each other really confuse the reader besides making the page look dirty, so utilize the line-spacing directive in CSS and space out the lines.
5. Don’t use long winding text
Nobody wants to read endless pages of uninterrupted, jammed text no matter how well it is written or how much it is useful. It is prudent to break the rambling text under sub-headlines summarizing the subject of the paragraph(s) and summarize points under bullets, wherever possible. This makes it easier for readers to scan the content while scrolling.
Don’t forget to check for spelling and grammar errors. If your website has whole lot of these typos, visitors will not take your website seriously. Check the text again and again to make sure it is error free. It is always safer to use a spellcheck tool.
Legibility of a website’s content is very important and quite easy to attain. Just put yourself in place of the visitor and visualize what you actually want from a website, content wise.
Adopt this customer centric visualization and added with some common sense, it will get you more readable, useable, and affordable web design. A good usable web design when combined with proper web marketing will bring you plenty of visitors who will stay longer and come back time and again.
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