The world of online marketing and web design dictates a fine line that must be walked, that is, working with the rendering of text. Text is an important aspect to design as well as a page’s ranking so a site simply cannot be designed using only images.
You simply have to find the right balance between the text and the images on your website.
The tricky part is trying to keep page content coded in the proper HTML tags (h1, p, strong) for search engine and accessibility purposes, but not to limit the design part of the process. Different operating systems, browsers, screens, and settings can all alter the way a web page is displayed. For example some users will have different fonts on their computers leading to the site appearing differently for different users. Consequently, choosing a particular font does not guarantee that your text will actually display in this font to all of your users and back up fonts will are necessary.
Variety in text display will affect your user experience in two primary ways:
- Stylistically – the fonts you use emphasize important text, help develop your site’s branding, and play a huge role in design.
- Practically – a change in font can make content more or less legible and even cause layout issues stemming from variations in font spacing and sizes.
While there is no perfect solution there are a few options for the designer to navigate while adapting their design to the needs of the user.
Forget about anything that keeps your clients from solving their problem, i.e., making a purchase, requesting a service, etc.
3 THINGS TO STAY AWAY FROM:
I. PDF Files for Online Reading
PDF files break the user browsing flow. Even simple things like printing or saving documents are difficult because standard browser commands don’t work.
Worst of all, PDF is a content block that is hard to navigate and requires a temporary pre-load before you can access it.
PDF is great for printing and for distributing manuals and other big documents that need to be printed. But the web pages require a different approach – the text should be redesigned into something that looks easily accessible on a web page.
II. Anything That Looks Like an Advertisement
As Jakob Nielson mentions in his article “Top 10 Mistakes in Web Design”:
Selective attention is very powerful, and Web users have learned to stop paying attention to any ads that get in the way of their goal-driven navigation.
However, users became also very advanced in ignoring legitimate design elements that look like prevalent forms of advertising. After all, when you ignore something, you don’t study it in detail to find out what it is.
Therefore, it is best to avoid any designs that look like advertisements:
- banner blindness means that users never fixate their eyes on anything that looks like a banner ad due to shape or position on the page
- animation avoidance makes users ignore areas with blinking or flashing text or other aggressive animations
- pop-up purges mean that users close pop-up windoids before they have even fully rendered; sometimes with great viciousness (a sort of getting-back-at-GeoCities triumph).
If you absolutely need to put something that requires action from your clients on your web page, you have to take into consideration the reading pattern online that we have discussed in the 1st article in this series: “Web Design Mistakes You Don’t Know You Are Making”.
III. Failing to Follow Design Consistency
Imagine this: You’re a salesman that has the best sales techniques ever. You have completed a thorough research of the client and prepared a presentation that is perfect.
You are talking to the client and the client has already decided to make a deal. He just wants you to give him the papers to sign.
But you yell at him: “Wait a minute! I haven’t finished my speech!!!”
Would you do that? Probably, not. Then why are you using design techniques that keep the visitor from getting to the sale?
Vincent Flanders in his article “Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995 – 2015” explains some of the many techniques that get in the way of the sale: Splash Pages, Flash Splash Pages (Video), animations, lack of focal point on the page, too much text, too little text, too many pictures, etc. Vincent stresses, that when people arrive at your site, it’s because they’ve made a commitment. They’ve clicked a link or an ad and now they are at your site so you don’t have to try to seduce them. Let them in your site.
On the other hand, seduction is necessary when you buy ads on other sites and search engines. You have to seduce people before they click.
Jakob’s Law of the Web User Experience states that “users spend most of their time on other websites.”
This means that they form their expectations for your site based on what’s commonly done on most other sites. If you deviate, your site will be harder to use and users will leave.
The only exception to that are websites which main purpose is to make users interact with the content to make them entertained: gaming websites, some music bands, interactive campaign games.
To sum up what we’ve discussed so far, we defined 2 simple rules toward the perfect combination of imagery & text that will attract clients to your website:
I. High-Quality Photography
One of the simplest ways to improve product pages is to show better photographs.
Using huge enlargements might seem to contradict the guideline about fast response times for downloading Web pages. But there’s a big difference between bloating a navigational page with irrelevant graphics and showing a big photo after the user asked for it. In the first case, the slow download interrupts the user’s flow. In the second case, the delay is expected, and while delays are never welcome, they are less of a problem when they’re clearly necessary to fulfill a user request.
A great downside of the online medium is that people can’t touch and feel your products. But close-ups and quality photographs can still give users a good approximation of a product’s tactile qualities, and they are essential to making people feel good about buying online.
II. Simplified Text
You can usually double website usability simply by rewriting the text to follow the guidelines for online content. Better writing is probably the single most important improvement you can make to your site. You must hire good writers for all your projects, and have all of their content edited by even better editors who are even more knowledgeable about content usability.
Expensive though they may be, editors are always worth the cost.
Twilight Zone Art 