Making Your Website Design Easy for Viewers

Your website design should be such that your visitors can look at the pages very easily. They should be able to read the text without a lot of eye strain. They should be able to find what they are looking for on the page quickly. And they should not have to scroll too far down the page in order to find what they are looking for. Here are some tips to do website design so that your readers can view the pages easily:

Make Text in a Font, Style, and Size that is Easy to Read

In website design, you should make the text large enough for the general population to read easily. Some designers try to squeeze too much on one page and the font size is such that the readers have to squint. Or, they use a style that is difficult to read such as a wavy, italic, cursive style of font that is very small. Stick to standard text such as Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, or Times New Roman. Make font black or another dark color on a white background. The background can sometimes be a pale color too but use with discretion. Use colored text only when it is necessary to highlight something.

You Can Make Text Much Easier to Read Through the Use of White Space

When you use more white space in between lines instead of the default spacing in website design, they are much easier to read. For example, if you want spacing between lines to be one and a half, you would use a style option in the TD html tag such as this:

<td style=”font:14px/150% Helvetica” width=”442″>this is a test</td>

The 150% directs the browser to space at one and a half times the default.

It is also a good idea to give plenty of white space on the left and right of any text inside a bordered cell. White space improves legibility.

Consider Even Your Text-based Population

Believe it or not, many people still use text-based browsers such as Lynx. Even still, some people turn off images with their browser loads for many reasons. Your website design should be considerate of these people as well. Use alternate text so that your users who turn off images can at least see a description. This even makes your site more accessible through other forms of web presentation such as a cell phone. In fact, if you need to have maximum exposure of the web site on all types of presentation devices, you should minimize or not even use images. Of course this type of website design depends on the requirements of the client.

Design Links with Care

When you place links on a web page, make sure you put descriptive text in them so that they identify where the link will take the browser but not so lengthy that they clutter the design of the web page. Remember that good website design is based on simplicity. Don’t make your visitors have to read a novel when trying to follow a link.

Don’t Use Scrolling Text

You have seen them in website design. There are boxes where text either scrolls horizontally or vertically. Remember that in today’s busy lifestyle, no one has time to read a scrolling text box. In fact, many people come to a website and with a specific purpose and really do not care what is in the scrolling text anyways. This is just one more distraction taking focus away from the main content on the page.

Keep the Home Page Text Simple

People are going to read only a portion of what is displayed on a page. In fact, an 80/20 rule can be applied here. The 80/20 rule is that 80% of people will typically scan a page and the other 20% will read it word by word. So when you set up your home page with text that makes scanning easy, you allow people the opportunity to focus on the links. The links should lead to pages where there is more detailed text.

Website design that keeps a site simple is a science in itself. But if your website is cumbersome to navigate and read, it will only drive most everyone away.