| Websites that make their customers work to read | | | | Give the lines room to breathe. |
| them are not the best way to get business. Miniscule | | | | Don't stack lines on top of each other. Use the |
| fonts, text in colours that make it hard to see | | | | line-spacing directive in CSS and give it some space; |
| against the background colour, and lines that are piled | | | | I'll often set line-spacing to 140% of the height of a |
| on top of each other are problems, but they're easy | | | | typical line. |
| to correct. Let's jump right in and look at five easy | | | | Break text up into chunks. |
| fixes: | | | | No matter how good a writer you are, people don't |
| Format your text using CSS. | | | | want to read endless pages of text. Break it up by |
| Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are the way to go - | | | | using headlines that reflect the subject of the |
| use one style sheet and control how text looks on | | | | paragraph(s) to follow so people can scan down to |
| your entire site. Make a change to the style sheet | | | | the parts that really interest them, or use bulleted |
| and your whole site is updated. It makes life a lot | | | | lists to change the pace of the writing and slow |
| simpler | | | | down the scanning. |
| Make the font size big enough to read | | | | And finally (not one of the 5 Easy Ways to Improve |
| Consider your target audience. Even if they are a | | | | Legibility but still quite important) check your spelling. |
| group of teenage girls looking for new shoes, it's | | | | Nothing irritates me more on a web page than |
| never a good idea to use tiny type. It doesn't have | | | | spelling errors - it simply makes you look like you |
| to be enormous, but up to a point, larger type is | | | | don't care enough to get it right. Use that ubiquitous |
| better. 12-pt Verdana is better than 8-pt Verdana. | | | | spell-check tool. |
| Make the text contrast with its background. | | | | Making your website's content more legible is easy. It |
| The more contrast, the better. Black-on-white or | | | | doesn't take a lot of time, mainly common sense. |
| white-on-black are examples of the highest contrast | | | | The payoff will be text that's more readable, |
| you can get. Use colours if you like, but if you squint | | | | customers that stick around long enough to get your |
| at the page and your text basically vanishes, there's | | | | message, and improved credibility with your visitors. |
| not enough contrast. | | | | |