When you read something and can soothingly go on and on with no stress then the message that you want your reader to get is conveyed properly. This style of delivering your write up in such a way that your readers feel the ease of reading is Readability. As people visit you to get information and if the information can’t be accessed with ease you wont be able to reach your readers.
Short and sweet sentence are always effective and makes a mark. So if a thing can be stated in a sentence or two don’t make it paragraph long. As great things come in small packages.
Be precise with what you have to say, in two or three sentence. Instead of making the paragraph long break it into smaller paragraphs, as it looks trendy and is easy to express as well.
Don’t hesitate to keep space between your paragraphs. An ideal way is to divide your line-height by your font-size. That is you will keep it in a space of 1.5.
To manage and make it look decent make use of heading, subheading, bullets etc so that the readers get all the important information.
Structured hierarchy like Title, Introduction, Heading, Text, Subheading – Text, gives your page a more logical flow.
One of the major benefits of using headings is that readers can scan down and see exactly what is in the article. This only works if the headings stand out, so feel free to use larger fonts, underlines, colors or whatever else is necessary.
The shorter the width, the easier it is to read. So try to limit the width, this will certainly help. You can see this being applied in newspapers and magazines. And it can also be applied to the web.
Colours are another important aspect that adds lots to readability, so try and use contrast colors to make the text more prominent. But try and avoid colours that are loud and disturbs the visitors reading.
Background plays the lead role as it matters where you are writing you text. A soothing background speaks for the letters written, so choose a background with great care. Avoid loud background colours and patterns, keep it decent and professional.
Some users like it small some big, so let your reader have the control over the size of the text.
Don’t make your text over attractive. Avoid using italics and other design styles which is hard to read and understand, keeping it simple will make it effective.
Mixed case is easier to read than uppercase. Uppercase is taken as a dictator in terms of webpage that screams, we don’t want to portray as a dictator so to be in amicable relation with the reader and to ease the reader use mixed case.
The visitor might get bored with chunks of text so be innovative and keeping the synchronization lighten your write-up.
There are things in a post that are unavoidable that are the post date, authors name etc, but it is not crucial so to write these elements use faint color so you wont draw attention to them unless you want to.
If an image plays a vital part in your post, use it but with technicality, that is place the image such that it looks like it is a part of the article, not just a decoration. So center it, and skip a line before and after the image.
Adverts in the middle of the post is a hurdle to the reader as it disturbs the readers pace so try avoiding it.
Design is what addresses the post so the post needs to stand out. You need to design in such a manner that it should be obvious where the post starts and stops. Your sidebar, comments, etc. should be visually distinct from the main content.
Readers and visitors are used to viewing links with an underline, so to help keep them within your site try make sure that the links are underlined so that the user recognizes them.
Using images as links means that you can make your links more aesthetically pleasing but it hides your valuable text that can be picked up by screen readers, and interrupts the readers pace.
Your visitor came to your site for your post, so don’t let a long side bar take all the attention keep it short.
If you are planning on referring your article from one page to other than make the mechanism simple to use. It is important that simplicity is considered as you don’t want your reader to get diverted because of pagination.