When your average Joe visits your store or your organization, you want their experience to be positively fabulous. If they come looking for the solution to a problem, you want to deliver with speed and efficiency so that they’ll have a good perception of you and your brand and will return to engage in future business transactions or even tell their friends about your wonderful service.

You put a lot of time and effort into your reputation and making sure that any public-facing elements, such as sales representatives, advertising and even your showroom floor look their best and put your customers at ease.

When it comes to the text you’re putting on your website, are you unknowingly confusing or irritating your visitors? Here are three common mistakes that otherwise well-meaning webmasters frequently make.

Using underlines and/or the color blue for emphasis

Did you instinctively want to click on that text above and was confused when your cursor didn’t change because it isn’t a link? According to studies performed by usability experts like Jacob Nielsen, this is because of two main reasons –

  1. “underlines provide a strong perceived affordance of clickability”1, which is due to the default browser link styling indicators – which makes linked text…..drumroll…..underlined and….
  2. Blue. “Shades of blue provide the strongest signal for links.”2

Remember how you felt when you couldn’t click the links above? If you use the color blue or underlines for your non-linking text (or combine both), you’ll confuse and disappoint your web site visitors because their perception of the text being a link will be wrong.

Not formatting text for the web

The next time you have a novel next to your computer, pick it up and open it. Don’t read the words, just scan the page for formatting. Is anything bold or italics? Are paragraph sizes long or short? I’m going to guess that it’s mostly a big block of text with little to no formatting. That’s because people READ books.

Now go to a major website. Pick one, any one. Ok, I’ll pick Amazon. What do you see? No big blocks of text here – font sizes, colors, bold etc. all vary and text, when it is in sentence format, doesn’t tend to stay in large blocks. That’s because users don’t READ the web, they SCAN it.

“On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.” – According to Nielsen3.

There are several tricks you can use to make text scannable including :

  • bulleted lists
  • short paragraphs
  • highlighting keywords with bold or italic formatting

and more. http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/

Avoiding Consistency

Consistency on the web is sometimes hard to find, as well it should be when it comes to differentiating yourself from your competitors. But one thing you can be certain of is that users will spend more time on sites OTHER than your own, and will thus base their expectations off their other experiences.

When they come to your site they should see fonts that are the same or complimentary, text sizes that vary but not randomly and colors that repeat. This will put your site visitors at ease because they know what to expect.

The more random and wild your site looks from page to page, the more insecure you’ll make your visitors feel, and the more apt they’ll be to go to a competitor’s site instead.

Making your website copy easy to read and functional for your visitors isn’t hard to do, it just takes a little knowledge of what they expect. These are just a few tips – if you’d like some statistics on eye-tracking and other usability studies and recommendations based off that data, Nielsen’s site is highly recommended.

Now go write and format some great web site text!

Absolute Marketing Group can help you with website copywriting if you need help. We have a Fargo-Moorhead based web design team that can help you do everything you read about on our web site. Contact us today if you need help with your next web project.

 
1 and 2 http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040510.html
3 http://www.useit.com/alertbox/percent-text-read.html