Enhance the Readability of Your Small Business Website
A well designed website is quite important for the proliferation of your small business over Internet. Since a website is a mirror image of a business, therefore website design should be done after proper thinking and a lot of planning. You need to devote a lot of time and money in designing your small business web site, writing the copy for it and have it all done by a professional designer and copywriter.
It may be easy to design a website but it takes a lot of efforts to bring people to read it. According to research, content in and of itself is not enough. No matter how much useful information you put into a Web page, a visitor will only spend a few seconds scanning it before they decide whether to leave or to stay.
A research study reveals that 79% visitors scan the web site, and only 16% read its each and every word. There are several factors which need to be considered when building a superior web site for your small business:
• Highlight The Words - Important words and phrases should be highlighted with color, boldings, italics, underlining, etc., so as to make the selling words and phrases on the website more prominent to the visitors.
• Meaningful Sub-Headings - Subheadings help browsers to evaluate the information on a web page. They also help break the text up and make it look less intimidating. It is recommended to use h1 tags for the main page heading and h2 - h6 tags for the other subheadings.
• Chunk the Text – ‘Chunking the text’ means to break the text into manageable pieces. This can be done by dividing the website content in short sentences, sections, paragraphs, lists and tables etc.
• Fixed Font Size - Sometimes websites are designed in such a way that their font size could not be changed on different browsers. Usually, this fixed font size is too small which reduces the readability of many readers. Let your readers resize the text as needed thereby respecting their preferences.
• Inverted Pyramid Style - This is probably the only term that you may not have heard before. You could write the content on your web site as a variation of the inverted pyramid (as shown in figure below) by writing a summary lead first followed by facts in decreasing order of importance and minor details at the end.
• Half the Word Count - Web users hardly read the each word in the web content. What they usually do is to scan the page, pick up the words and find necessary data. So, avoid writing lengthy web content and try to keep it to the point, customer-oriented and easy to find.
It is true that website design has a strong impact on credibility. Your design should be well organized and easy to navigate. Moreover, your web pages should take seconds to load or you might lose visitors.
