To enhance readability and comprehension, it’s important to avoid large blocks of continuous text. Many readers will be intimidated by a wall of text and will simply give up.
Read the following excerpt from my book ‘The NZ Small Business Superhero’s Marketing Handbook’ for tips on how to improve the readability and comprehension of your website content.
Here are some guidelines for improving the readability of your website text:
- Bulleted lists (like this one) are very skimmable and have also been shown to improve readability and comprehension.
- Short sentence and paragraph length greatly enhances the readability of the content, and creates valuable white space on the page.
- Stick to one idea per paragraph because visitors will often skip over any additional ideas if they are not dealt with early in the paragraph.
- Try to keep paragraph length to no more than four lines, and try to have no more than eight paragraphs without a subhead.
- Another way to improve the scannability of your sentences is to highlight keywords. You can do this with links, as well as typeface variations, like bold and italic, and colour.
For more information on writing engaging copy for the web, check out the following article by web usability guru Jakob Nielsen: www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html.
To read more, you can purchase my book ‘The NZ Small Business Superhero’s Internet Marketing Handbook’ by clicking here.
