When you go about creating pages and posts for your WordPress site, keeping a few ideas in mind will help your pages to be much more enjoyable to read…which prevents people from immediately going somewhere else.
When I create pages, I try to break up the text a bit. Nothing makes most people less likely to read something than seeing a bunch of text all jumbled together.
Using these guidelines, you should end up with readable pages, if not the prettiest…but readable is much better than pretty for selling.
- Use the <p> tag to enclose paragraphs
- This gives nice breaks between paragraphs.
- Breaks between paragraphs reduce eye strain.
- Use readable fonts for paragraphs
- Neat fonts are ok for headlines and such
- Small text should always be as readable as you can make it.
- Verdana, Helvetica, and Ariel are excellent on screen fonts.
- in css, use → font-family: Helvetica, Verdana, Ariel;
- Use lists liberally
- If you are spouting attributes for something, use a list to do so
- As a bonus, lists stand out visually
- Use horizontal rules if necessary
- In some cases, a horizontal rule is just the thing to make a page more readable
- <hr /> is your friend
- Use header tags
- When a page contains logical sections, break them up with header tags
- <h3>, <h4>, and <h5> are your friends
- Use pictures
- If you have pictures for what you are writing about, consider including them
- Wide pictures make great text breaks
- Small pictures can be floated left or right of text to make it less dense
- <img src="" style="float: left; padding-right: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.25em;" />
- <img src="" style="float: right; padding-left: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.25em;" />
Read your own articles
Before you publish a page, preview it and see if it looks readable or not.
Keep in mind that you are probably biased. With time, you will recognize when you could use a bit more readablity without even looking at your pages.
