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People look at the pictures on a website even more than they do in a book but when it comes to people really getting value out of your site what you write down is crucial to success.
To get people to read your site you need to make sure the text is well laid out, concise and easy to read.
Layout: Huge blocks of text turn the viewer off. Also think if you could highlight certain words to add contrast to them. The length of a webpage should be no longer than 4 page lengths long, less is certainly better. If you need to provide huge lengths of text what about providing a printable word document or pdf file as a download. Computer screens are not as easy to read as paper and ink.
Concise: As huge blocks of text turn viewers off consider every word and re read every paragraph to see if you can remove anything unnecessary.
Easy to Read: Being easy to read is very important when considering your design. Black Text on White Backgrounds is the easiest for the human eyes to deal with. This is worth bearing in mind especially when people may be using lower quality displays or even have slightly impaired eyesight. I would recommend sticking to light backgrounds/dark text unless the merits of the design of your sites genuinely out weigh the visibility of the text. Are people wanting to see good design before getting information. If you are a trendy bar this might be the case but not if you sell spanners!!!!
Other considerations include making sure the font you use is web safe. Only certain fonts are installed as standard on windows PCs so trying to use an obscure font on your machine will not mean everyone can see it. Only use the following fonts Arial, Courier, Times New Roman, Verdana and Georgia (also for Macs Helvetica). The Clever Websites service will take care of this for you. You can use other fonts in picture files but this is only appropriate for titles and buttons. It is also best to keep your sites to a maximum of 3 fonts across titles, text, buttons etc.
Be wary of using underlining where not denoting a hyperlink. This has become the norm and people will expect to be able to click through to something else, use bold or italic effect instead.
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