Heavy Content Site

How to make it easier to read for the visitor?

[le_gber]

Hi all,

I am currently designing a site that is going to have a lot of content.

I have used bold and italic and colours changes to make it easier to read but I was wondering what else do you think would work from experience? HR, pictures, white space?

Thanks for your input.

Leo

[engine]

I suppose it depends upon the construction of your pages. Personally, I wouldn't like to read pages with lots of bold and italic. It breaks the flow.

I'd break the content up into small, bite-sized pages and work hard on creating a menu that will make navigation easy.

[Robino]

"Content"?

Organization is KEY!

Break up your articles (content) into small, easy-to-read, scannable blocks. Make sure that people can print the pages correctly.

Paragraphs shouldn't be more that five or six lines.

Your site's search function needs to work well.

Page titles should be useful and should reflect the document's subject. Many people like to bookmark and article or page for future reading/referrence.

What type of content are you dealing with?

[peter andreas]

We have lots of bigger H2 and H3 headings with suggestive titles. It breaks up solid blocks of text which isn't appealing to most people.

[le_gber]

Thanks guys,

The goal of the site has changed and I've been asked to make less pages with less content, which as I agreed could work out better.

Thanks for your help though, will keep these ides in mind.

Leo

[karmov]

Less content... *Gasp* :) You should really plug as much content as you have available. It may be a pain to organize initially, but it will be well worth it in the long run.

[rogerd]

I agree with karmov, le_gber... smaller pages may work well, but use your content to create more pages.

[Macro]

How to make it easier to read for the visitor?

Use columns.

[tedster]

A couple more ideas:

1. If your layout is liquid, find a way to limit the width of a line of type.

2. Use extra line-height. And where practical, add some letter-spacing to your heads and subheads.

3. Many of the ideas above are excellent, and some fall into the area I consider "signs of progress". A reader needs to feel like they are getting somewhere. And a page needs to have landmarks that make one part look different from another. It can be as simple as a bullet point section or a bolded phrase in the middle of a paragraph.

4. Run-on heads and hanging indents.

5. Subtle background shades for a content grouping that only some want to read (such as a long quote) so it's easy to find where that section stops stops.

6. Special care given to the first phrase in each paragraph. If your visitor has stopped reading and lapsed into skimming, each new paragraph is a chance to draw them back into full-reading mode. If they stay in skmmingmode for too long, you've lost them.

7. For extended content, find a good balance between clicking to a new page and scrolling a long one. My own tests over the last two years have shown a very strong break-point around 4-5 screens of scrolling at 1024 resolution. But very short pages (under 3 screens of scrolling) with lots of "click for the next section" going on don't hold many visitors through until the end of the article.

8. Keep headings short. If some headings must be a bit longer, then break them into two lines so that the readres eye can grab them in one glance instead of needing to scan the width of a monitor.

[peter andreas]

This info is really useful-thanks

[le_gber]

karmov, rogerd, thanks, I have been thinking of building the content site on another domain away from the original work, to see the difference in conversion rate.

Macro, I always had a problem with text layout on a page, I think I need to take some evening course on design and layout fonctionality (or may be one of you can give me the name of a good book to read)

tedster, great info and thanks for your hand on experienc on the average number or screen people usually read, scroll.

I have read some interesting thread on how to make or subcontract writing work to students or copywriters (as my target market is uk based, like me, but it's not my mother tongue).

Any of you have some good resource (paper based is fine) about text layout and ease of read?

Thanks

Leo

[jimh009]

Pictures or graphics are a great way to break up too big of blocks of content. I use it heavily on my site and it works great.

[EileenC]

Don't forget about bullet points or sidebar boxes, especially for material you want to emphasize.

[claus]

It deserves repeating although both tedster and EileenC beat me to it:

• bullet points in you text - use them
  
• It makes a text scan easily
  
• People don't read online, they scan
  
• Even Jacob Nielsen says this
  
• Also, make sure your pages print well
  
• If they're worth reading they will be printed
  
• Oh, and don't go above seven bullets in any list
  

[rogerd]

One thing that's great about the web is that it lets you break down material in the way that makes most sense, not based on arbitrary page dimensions.

So, as you add bullets, sidebars, text highlights, etc., keep looking at the big picture - if your page is starting to look cluttered and unfocused, it's probably time to subdivide it in some way.