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Web Text: Miscellaneous Tips
- Make your main text at least 12 points in size. That's good for most adults.
- Limit the use of italics. It's hard to read on screen.
- Don't use long lines of text. The wider the line, the more difficult it is to read. If your window is 700 pixels wide, you might make the text area 500 pixels, with a sidebar of 200 pixels. Or something like that. Windows that expand to fill the entire screen can be especially problematic if text then stretches across the whole screen.
Keep a lot of contrast between the text and the background. Black and white, the ends of the color spectrum, give the greatest contrast. As you come inward--say, blue text on yellow background--you lost some contrast. Red on purple, or blue on black, provide practically no contrast and, therefore, are pretty much unreadable.- Don't use small serif fonts. Serif fonts are okay on screen, but not at small sizes, where the flags get lost in the low-resolution environment.
- Don't use ALL-CAPS. Everybody should know that by now. It's the online version of shouting.
- Don't put large pieces of text in image format (gifs or jpegs). They take more time to load, and Google is unable to index the words. You certainly don't want to embed your service times or location (city and state) in an image, because that crucial info will be useless to Google.
- It's best to use left-alignment on the web.
- Don't center everything on web pages. It's harder to read. Imagine reading a book in which the text is centered on every page. Yikes.
- Avoid justified text, too (straight edges on both sides of the column). On the web, you'll end up with unequal spacing between words. The narrower the column, the worse this gets. Use left alignment, and this won't be an issue (because the computer doesn't try to make the right-hand edge straight).
Add Your Own Thoughts. Please.