Make Your Web Pages Easier to ReadWritten by Mario Sanchez
Computer screens are hard on eyes, and their limited size forces users to scroll. This makes reading online harder, slower and more uncomfortable than reading on print. Following are a few simple tips that you can follow to make experience of reading online easier to your visitors:1. Write less: Try to use at least 50% of words you would use in print. Once you finish writing, go back and try to further reduce your word count. 2. Use headlines to break discussion into several paragraphs. Breaking discussion into small, manageable chunks, each dealing with a sub-topic of your discussion, makes things much easier for readers. 3. Online users don't read, they scan. Use elements that facilitate scannability: bolding key words and phrases, and using bullet points are two examples of this technique. 4. Try to convey one idea per paragraph, instead of bundling them in long, cumbersome paragraphs. 5. Use hyperlinks to present complementary information instead of trying to include everything in body of your article. For example, if you are writing a piece about "search engine submission techniques", you may touch subject of "keyword optimization" at one given point. If you want to explain what "keyword optimization" means, hyperlink words to another page where readers can find more about that subject.
| | The Web Page Width DilemmaWritten by Mario Sanchez
With so many different resolutions (640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, etc.), browsers (Internet Explorer, Netscape, etc.), and platforms (Windows, Mac, etc.) in use, it is very difficult to design a page that looks good (or at least looks same) in all configurations.To design a page that looks good with most configurations, let's start by defining our main objective: we must never force a user to scroll horizontally. In other words, our page must always fit within available screen width. This would suggest that we have to design our page for lowest common denominator: 640x480. However, less than 1% of Internet users utilize this archaic resolution (which was common when 14" screens were best you could get). Therefore, we can rationally make decision to ignore 640x480 resolution (since forcing 99% or users to read a low resolution page to accommodate 1% of our user base doesn't sound too efficient), and design our page for resolutions of 800x600 and higher. Since 800x600 remains most popular resolution today (May, 2003), we must optimize our page design for this resolution, meaning that our page should look best at 800x600. Bear in mind that I'm not saying that we must necessarily design an 800 pixel wide page, only that it must look best in screens with 800x600 resolutions (read on and you'll see what I mean...). At this point, we're ready for our next decision: should we design a fixed-width page, or should we specify width of our page in percentage terms? There are pros and cons for both. The main advantage of a fixed-width page is that layout will always remain as you intended, even when viewed at higher resolutions. The main disadvantage is that users with larger screens, set at higher resolutions, will not be able to fully utilize them, and will instead see large, unused blocks of space around your page (certainly, a disappointment to those users who spent a lot of money for a large computer screen).
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