The single most important element on your website…
Man, it happened again!
I went to read an article at a website, and the text size was tiny!
So I used my browser’s “Text Size” function to try to increase the size of the text so that my 40-something eyes could read it. But alas, the website was designed to force the text size to remain unreadably small.
This is bad site design and programming — especially for an information website that targets a 40+ audience!
And the forced-text phenomenon happens a lot more than it should.
But why? And how can you prevent it from happening to your site? Let’s face it: many sites are designed by 20-something designer/programmers with perfect vision. And I have found that most young designers seldom read copy!
Often, young designers merely glance at the text; seeing it as a sea of evil black letters, a necessary-but-evil design element. Because designers don’t read the copy, they assume the audience won’t, either. As long as the site looks good, most designers could care less what the words actually say.
I’ve actually see sites go live with “Lorem Ipsum” still in the copy areas!
But copy is actually the single most important element on your web page! People are on the internet searching for information. People enter WORDS into search engines. And the search engine spiders that visit your site? They only index written information. People come to your site looking to get information, not to absorb your design!
In internet marketing, WORDS rule. If I had a choice between a site that was either all words or all pictures, I would take all words every time, hands down.
Fortunately, I do not have to make that choice! Words and pictures can live in blissful harmony on a website. And good designers know how to marry the two.
But picking style over substance is a mistake that many young designers and web entrepreneurs make.
Don’t let it happen to you!
Do not be seduced by good looks alone!
On the internet, written content is king!
Let your visitors decide on text size!
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A good call Laura. Far too many web designers are still setting fixed font sizes in their code. The quicker that they all learn to use variable fonts in the form of ‘em’ or CSS tags like ’small’ etc and let us take control with our browsers the better.
Of course… if they give the user control, the user might make their beautiful design look bad. Oh dear! What a paradigm.
I can see how it happens, but can’t believe it still does.