Email recipients read with one finger on delete key. One click and your email is gone. Internet users surf Web with their finger poised on mouse button. One click and they’re gone. As a web site owner or ezine publisher, you must have good content, but to keep your customers from clicking away or hitting delete key, you must strive to make their online reading experience as easy as possible.

Reading online is about 20% slower than reading from print and a lot harder on eyes. And although people browsing Web are looking for information, they’re also very impatient. For these reasons, most visitors to your web site will only scan your content; they won’t read it.

You probably scan when you read newspaper so you know what I mean. You glance at headlines and from there choose article you want to read. This happens on Web, too, but even more so. Within an article or web page, people will scan for sub- headlines. So, whereas they’ll read whole article in newspaper, they’ll only read bits and pieces of it on Web.

Armed with this knowledge, you can make your content much easier for people to read.

1. Provide a Table of Contents at beginning of long pages.

Adding a Table of Contents to beginning of your article or ezine enhances a reader’s experience.

Here’s a comment from one of my ezine subscribers: "First off, I really like ‘Tell-em-what-they're-going-to-get’ approach to header of your ezine. Just had to tell you."

He’s talking about my Table of Contents, something so simple, yet it warranted a comment from a reader.

If your article or ezine is in HTML format, use "named anchor" tag to make items in your Table of Contents "clickable."

Note: Not everyone’s email software renders HTML properly. Always offer your readers a plain text version of your newsletter. One day we’ll all use HTML for our ezines, but we’re not quite there yet. Some autoresponders and email management software will "sniff out" a recipient’s ability to render HTML and deliver appropriate email (for this to work, you have to write two versions of your newsletter -- one in plain text and one in HTML).

2. Break up your page with sub-headlines.

Provide your readers with ability to scan your page and pick out topics that interest them. If you don’t provide sub- headlines, there’s a very good chance your readers will skip page entirely.

On a web page or in an ebook, use a different colour for sub- headlines or bold them. Use underlines on web pages cautiously as readers may think text is a link. In a text-based ezine, you should indicate sub-headlines with bullets, asterisks, numbers, or arrows (made up of dashes and a right-angle bracket).

You can also type headings in all capital letters, but this will make them harder to scan. Most people use shape to help them recognize words. If you use all capital letters, you

remove this ability and slow reader down. Remember, impatience is norm on Internet, so try not to put up any roadblocks to easy reading.

3. Break up passages.

Notice how all my paragraphs are short? No more than a few lines each? I strive to keep each paragraph to no more than 100 words. That’s to provide small chunks of information that can be easily digested.

Note: Just because a paragraph is 109 words, doesn’t mean you have to automatically try to break it into two smaller paragraphs. Just use common sense and you’ll be fine.

4. Create white space to reduce eye-fatigue.

Breaking up your page into small paragraphs creates plenty of white space to rest reader’s eyes. It’s important to minimize readers’ fatigue so they’ll keep reading. If this article were written as one long chunk, you wouldn’t be reading it by now, especially if you were reading it online.

5. Use short sentences.

As you may also have noticed, this article is not made up of long, convoluted sentences. Each sentence is fairly short and therefore easily read at a glance.

You don’t want to tax readers thinking either. Shorter sentences are easier to understand and digest. If you want people to "get your message," keep your sentences short.

6. Use short lines of text.

When writing your ezine, use a text editor and set it to put a hard return after every 65 characters. That will ensure your ezine articles have short lines that can be read at a glance. I use TextPad for this (http://www.textpad.com).

When I’m finished writing my ezine content, I cut and paste text into my autoresponder and it retains hard returns. You can also cut and paste your text into body of an email.

On your web page, use a table to contain your text. Do not set your table to 100% width. If you do, it will stretch to fit any sized browser and your lines of text will end up long and difficult to read.

7. Use bullets.

Bullets are read even by scanners.

8. Enclose text in boxes or indent it.

If you indent text, put a Horizontal Rule before and after it. This trick makes it look boxed, but is more sophisticated than using a table with a border.