*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.
7 Responses to “Tipsy Tuesday – I Can’t Read the Text”
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That was really useful and I agree with all your points. The text size and color is important for me too..even very famous sites have some of these issues. Thanks for sharing. From Karma Bloggers! 🙂
Agree completely with your post, sometimes I go on a website and can’t even seen the text due to the colour, great post x
I have to agree with you. Back ground colors, unreadable text. links that float in front of the text are all frustrating.
I was on a site recently where the font was very curly and hard to read. The font would have probably been ok for just the headline which was big and bold but a thin, culry font through out the whole text was just too hard on my eyes (and my eyes are young! lol)
So true, thanks for the post