Website design tip #1 – Remember that you are creating your website for people not for computers to crawl and index. Whilst many people spend a lot of time changing a sites contents and structure for the benefit of search engines how much time is spent testing and improving the site for human readers? Think carefully of what you want to convey and the words that you will use to convey it. A well optimised site for a search engine isn’t always best for human readers.
Website design tip #2 – Pay careful attention to the font and its attributes such as size. Certain fonts are easier to read than others, some are available only on certain platforms or machines. Although your computer may list thousands of fonts when you are creating a page, you will only have a small subset of these you can actually use. Why not print out some standard text in a variety of fonts and get other people to rate how easy they are to read rather than relying on your own judgement of what looks good. Pay attention to the font size as well. Unfortunately you wont be able to find a size that suits all, trust me on this, however use one that the majority will be comfortable with.
Website design tip #3 – Have you ever wondered why newspapers put their news articles in columns rather than using the full width of the page? Well the answer is that if they used the full width it would be awkward to read as if the reader was far enough away for the eyes to scan the extra long line, the text would be too small. Whilst most webpages aren’t on the scale of newspaper broadsheets, consider using columns for your text, especially if there are different articles on your page.
Website design tip #4 – Get a decent contrast. Almost everyone by now has visited a web page where the author, for some unknown reason, has put text on the page which is a similar colour to the background. You need a sufficient amount of contrast to make the text legible, the greater the contrast the fast you can read. Black on white is the ultimate and for important information shouldn’t be derived from.
To summarise, a website where the text is clear, legible and well laid out will be a website which the users can effectively use and will either make them hang around on your site for longer or more likely to return. Happy designing.
By: R Reed
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Tags: Attributes, Benefit, Careful Attention, Design Decisions, Design Tip, Fonts, Human Readers, Judgement, Legible, Many People, News Articles, Newspapers, Pay Attention, platforms, Search Engine, search engines, Subset, Suits, website design tips, Website Website Design
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