Readable text
[October 2004] Continuing our Tips for Terrific Sites, this month's Tip suggests keeping pages brief and using plenty of headlines.
Visitors read text on websites very differently from the way they read printed books, leaflets and magazines. You need to take this into account when you create a website and use text a little differently.
For one thing, your website is only one click away from a million other websites. If you don't grab the reader's attention, and keep it, they are just as likely to leave your site and head for more interesting pages.
For another, research has shown that people seldom actually read a web page. They will skim the page quickly and only stop to read when something takes their interest.
Many people also dislike reading on a computer screen and will either print off interesting material or just move on.
To gain and hold your visitor's attention you need to put the important information first and get to the point quickly, offer highlights and break the text into easily accessible chunks.
Keep sentences and paragraphs short. Aim for about 15 to 20 words maximum in a sentence and five or six lines for a paragraph.
Use plenty of headings and lists where appropriate. A heading should be more of a headline. Think: what would a newspaper put as the heading? A heading should quickly summarise the paragraphs below it. A reader should be able to grasp the overall meaning of a page just by looking at headings.
Lists with bullet points or numbers are easier to read and grasp than long lines of text.
Avoid jargon, abbreviations and acronyms, and be sure to explain the ones you do use. Your organisation might know what NZXYZ means, but does your visitor?
If graphics, images, charts and diagrams would be useful then be sure to include them, but beware making the page load too slowly. Use image editing software to reduce the file size of the image, and if a high resolution image is needed (eg larger than 30KB), move it off the page, and link to it via a small 'thumbnail' picture.
Divide longer pages into several shorter pages. People are easily put off by having to scroll, and scroll, and scroll. On the other hand, they don't like having to click, and click, and click to read things, so you need to be cautious with this.
Use plenty of white space too. Don't try to "cram" a lot of text into a small space.
If your web designer is setting fonts for the web page then remember that while serif fonts such as Times are fantastic for print, sans serif fonts such as Verdana work best on the computer screen.
Crawford Kilian's Adapting Print to the Web is a very useful article.