Is your website content easy to read?

One of the most basic reasons people visit your web site is to research you and your products. The readability of your website’s content is very important because good readability will dramatically improve customer conversion rates.

While much of your website's communication revolves around the graphical layout and navigation structure the ultimate goal for many websites is to get the visitor to actually read about their products and services. The formula goes like this. Firstly you need to get the person to read your content, and secondly they need to be able to understand your content so that they can then get all the information required to make an informed decision to buy your product or service.

What you actually see with a lot of website design layouts and colours is that the information is structured in such a way that even if you read it, it is very difficult to actually understand the content and for it to be remembered. A significant number of studies have been done on readability of the text on different coloured backgrounds and how the comprehension rate of that text can be dramatically increased or decreased with various colour combinations. Web design studios that have an over emphasis on design will often use reverse text, which is essentially white text on a dark background to fit in with their web design colour scheme. We have directly experienced the disastrous results that can occur when a clean clear, easy to read website is converted to a graphically impressive reverse text website. In our own experience, we saw a client’s online sales plummet seven fold within the space of a few months. On the flipside we recently upgraded an accommodation website and its readability and increased by a factor of four the number of online enquiries without additional traffic.

The other factors other than colour to consider when writing your text are how I make my copy easy to read. A good strategy is to actually test your text against scientific standards. You can get a score of how easy your text is to read by copying your text into the link below and use one of the measures of text readability.

http://www.standards-schmandards.com/exhibits/rix/index.php

This test will give you a readability score at a grade level average. In general, the lower you can make the grade level average, the more people will understand your message. Why not give your web site content the test it needs to see if you need to review the way you communicate your message.

Dale Carter runs a Perth Web Design Studio that specialises in web site development and Internet Marketing Strategies. For details visit www.gtp-icommerce.com

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