*Please don’t think that I am scolding anyone as this post is being read – I’m not. I just saying that if you want people to visit your site, read your posts, join in on a hop, be a sponsor of a giveaway being hosted, become an affiliate, – then your site has to be friendly enough for people to stick around. And in my opinion – next to site visitors, the text piece is the most important piece of a site…wouldn’t you agree?
This week I’m finding it necessary to write about text on websites. Why? Because I left another site where I could not read the text on Monday morning – literally. This happened to be a site that asked me to become an affiliate of theirs. The text on that page was too light for my eyes…so what did I do? I left the site. A couple weeks ago – I came across a blog that had a light pink text – I could not read it and left immediately. Another incident, there was a blogger looking for sponsors to a giveaway she was administering. I couldn’t read what was being asked of me, so I left the site without joining in on the giveaway. These are just a few examples; however this has happened to me a LOT lately, and it’s frustrating. It’s frustrating because I’m taking the time to go to these sites and I can’t do what I went to accomplish. Not only is it me who loses out but the site owner as well.
Then there are the times when I will click out of a site if the text is too small – but please don’t make it really big either – that’s hard on the eyes too. As far as the text being too small and I cannot read it, I will hit Ctrl+ to enlarge the page. And although, I know enough to hit Ctrl + to enlarge the text on a page, many do not. Should the text be not only small, but light in weight as well – I’m instantly gone.
Regardless, if I cannot read the text whether it be too small, too light, or both – then there has to be others who cannot read it either. What this means is a loss of traffic for your site. Your bounce rate skyrockets (happens when one leaves your site without visiting another page), you won’t have these visitors as return visitors, and the average time on your site will diminish.
And here’s food for thought – young eyes work very well – older eyes – well, not so well. It’s all part of the aging process and the body experiencing system breakdowns – just like a home or a car. Site owners need to consider all the age groups of visitors coming to their site. Lastly – don’t use a lot of flashing widgets on your site – they can set off a seizure in those who have Photosensitive Epilepsy.
Next Monday – I am introducing Medical Monday. I will write more on Photosensitive Epilepsy and how it effects website viewers and owners.
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[…] Take a break from looking at your site – when you come back does anything stick out to you that is hard on the eyes at a first glance? Even certain types of fonts have been noted to effect people with these types of seizures. Here’s a cool tool for you provided by W3C – free service for validating Web pages against standard formats. Note – validation is not mandatory on the Web – however, it is useful for improving the quality of the pages on your site. That being said – the only thing that passed their standards for my site was the Feed Validator – guess I better get busy on learning more about Word Press. Did you know? Certain types of music can bring on seizures. Another Post you may be interested in – Tipsy Tuesday – I Can’t Read the Text […]
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