This article covers how websites present information to their users. It’s the first in a series of articles that examines the key design elements in a website, providing a framework for you to evaluate your own site’s usability and effectiveness.
Sub-divide your content
A large block of text running to several hundred words is too much to read comfortably. Break up your content using headings and keep paragraphs short so that visitors can scan the page and find the information they are most interested in.
Remember that users do not generally read all the information on a web page. They tend to scan the page looking for interesting content before quickly moving on.
Negative space
Negative space (or white space) refers to the areas around your content – for example, the space between images, the distance between each paragraph, the line height of the text. Good use of negative space will give your content room to breathe and make your content more readable.
To illustrate these first two areas, take a look at this partial screenshot from the Pizza Express website.
Relevant content
People are visiting your website to find specific information, not to read a book. Keep your content relevant and succinct and absolutely avoid using jargon.
Sticking with our food theme, an example of irrelevant content might be a restaurant website that provides a detailed history of the restaurant on the home page. People visit restaurant sites to check the menu or book a table, not to find out when it was founded.
Page hierarchy
Simply – put your important stuff first. Provide a summary at the top of the page that will help the user understand why they should read the rest of the page (or why they don’t need to bother).
Page titles
Check your page titles – not the headings on the page but the title of the page in the browser bar. This title is what your visitors will see in search results. If it’s not relevant or if it’s too generic, they won’t click it. Use the title to convey important information about the page that users will find interesting – don’t just put your company name there. It’s wasted.
This image shows the page title for this site’s home page as it appears in the browser window and in a Google search result.
Page titles are an important consideration in how the page is ranked by search engines. In the next article in this series we’ll look at some key factors that influence how search engines rank your site.
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