Website Design - Edit Your Web Pages For A Better Reading By Everyone After writing your web pages, have a close look at them to make sure all of your readers will be able to read them and enjoy reading them.
Here are a few things you should check before putting your web pages up live on your website.
Hard to Read Text
I am not old, but I do have reading glasses. If you want me to read your website then you should use a font size and color combination that is easy to read.
Very often I send email in the Times font and size 14. Smaller than that is getting difficult to read.
If you have something that you really want me to read, write an appropriate headline for it, and grab my attention. Learn the basic rules of writing good copy and follow them.
Bad Spelling
There is a poem I love that begins:
Eye halve a spelling chequer.
Knew wit my pea sea.
It plane lee marks four my revue
Miss steaks aye kin knot sea.
I may never have won the spelling bee at school? But I do know how to use a spell checker... and a little bit of logic.
More often than not, when the Microsoft grammar checker underlines something in green as a potential error, my phrase is correct.
Acronyms And Elitist Languages
Do all of your readers understand the acronyms you use?
Some of them may seem very common to you: LOL, laughing out loud and IMHO, in my humble opinion.
But a foreigner will have a harder time reading them. And he will probably stumble over numbers, such as in l8r, or later.
You might be writing to an audience that understands l33t, or leet, the "elite" language of writing using other keyboard characters to spell words out in a simple code..
If not, don't try to write "1 4m 5p34k1n6 |337".
And don't even think about the complex geek version of the same phrase: "1 @|\/| $|*3@|<1|\|6 |33+".
Both of these two phrases are "I am speaking leet". If you look closely to the two leet phrases you will see the "I am speaking leet" translation. But will all of your readers be able to follow you?
Image Size
Learn how to resize an image. Include the dimensions of all of your images. Here is an example:
height="120" width="360" in your "Picture of Cindy King".
When the height and width tags are included with your image, your user's browser will automatically know the size of the image and load them faster. The size of the image is defined and allows the browser to allocate the required space for the image while the rest of the page is loading.
There are so many free software packages out there that you can use to do this on your own computer. If you don't want to install the software, use one of the new online photo editing tools.
Defining the size of your images allows you to resize re-size them to fit your website better. This saves on bandwidth, makes your pages easier and faster to load, and does not make your visitors wait around.
Animation
When animation is done well on a website it can really enhance the user experience.
There is one site with a Flash image beginning as a dark red line which forms into a wineglass and then the wine glass fills up... without any delay in launching the page.Why? Because the Flash is a square 1 inch by 1 inch, or 2.5cm by 2.5cm if you prefer, that's why. The Flash file is small enough for everyone to enjoy.And this example is classy and relevant to the website.
How often do you see Flash used so well on a website? I probably will not see another classy and relevant flash image for 2 years.
As a general rule, don't use animated gifs or flash.
If you want to use an animated favicon with motion, it does not slow your website down, nor is it too annoying.
Marquee Text that scrolls across the screen and blinking text is just like an animation. And it can even be more annoying. It is usually more difficult to read.
If you really want to annoy your users, play a short bit of music along with the blinking. Keep the music short, play it loud, and repeat it non-stop.
A Better Read
Think about your readers and give them the best reading experience possible on your website.
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