Assessment: Is Your Website Easy to Read?
If your website is hard to read, viewers click away to your competitors. We use the following best-practice benchmarks in assessing your website’s readability.
Language level
Your viewers include people from many education levels and walks of life. Make sure all of them can read your website! Use words the average teenager will understand, unless your website is directed at physicians or scientists or other highly educated people. (Want to learn more? Wikipedia on readability levels and testing.)
Visual readability
If you have wide lines of text, viewers’ eyes get lost between one line and the next. A good rule of thumb is five to six inches for the maximum width of a line on the Web. Increasing the amount of space between lines also helps. (Want to learn more? Design a document for readability.)
Are many of your viewers over 40? As people get older, it’s harder for them to read small fonts. Either use larger fonts for everyone, or make sure your website’s text is easily resized. (Want to learn more? Font size and shape affects readability.)
Typos/spelling/grammar
Always run your text through a spelling and grammar checker. Then have it proofread by someone who knows whether you mean affect or effect, and whether to use whose or who’s. These kinds of mistakes make a website look amateurish.
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