Steps to Improve Your Website's Legibility - By: Neeraj Arora

Ever noticed websites with fonts so small, that even ants are put to shame? Or the color combination so hideous, that you close the site as soon as you opens the webpage? Or perhaps, those improper alignments reminding you of a bumpy river-bed with a river flowing helter skelter?

These are common observations of plenty of websites who do not understand the importance of Web Design Legibility. Many designers overlook this important aspect and decide on a background image that makes the whole site illegible. This is a grave, but avoidable error.

To improve your site's legibility, you need good typography. You can create much cleaner, more dynamic and greatly effective websites by choosing the right font or a proper combination of fonts, and then ensure proper alignment, spacing and color contrast.

Text Color and Background

Your choice of text color is totally dependent on the background color. A good combination of contrasting colors ensures increased legibility. One of the things you can do is to use dark text color on a light background. The best is black on white. Light colored text on a dark background proves quite strenuous to the eyes and therefore used sparingly. If you do decide in its favor, make sure to increase line height. Avoid garishly contrasting color combinations such as green-red or blue-red because they cause great eyestrain.

Font Type

The typeface is also equally important for good legibility and you can choose one specifically designed to provide proper screen output. Any typeface you decide upon should have generous x-heights and shortened descenders that support best legibility. Trebuchet, Arial, Georgia, Verdana, and Times New Roman are a few of the prominent ones. The fonts Verdana, Trebuchet MS, and Georgia are designed specially for enhanced screen output. They are the best choices for web text.

Alignment

Alignment is another vital aspect affecting good legibility on the web. Left alignment is the easiest to scan and read. Centered text is usually difficult to follow for more than two or three lines, and advisable to use it sparingly. Justified text is best suited to wide content areas containing large amounts of content.

Spacing

Proper spacing is directly relevant to web legibility, the most important part in this context being line height. When you allow sufficient space between text rows on your web page it leads to increased legibility.

Line Length and Layout

Line length and layout are other aspects that need attention. The ideal web page line length should be 70 to 80 characters at the most.
It is wise to pay attention to all issues discussed above. They are crucial to increasing the legibility on your site.

About the Author

Article written by Mr. Neeraj Arora, Marketing Director of Himalayan IT Group a Website Design India offers ecommerce solutions in India.

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