8 steps to a more readable blog

This entry was posted on October 24, 2007

What use is a blog that your visitors can’t read? Where’s the point in you working hard on great content if no one can see what it’s about? Here are my top 8 tips to making your blog more readable.

  1. Keep your lines short. No more than 15-20 words is good. If you have a fluid layout that’s designed to stretch for larger resolutions, consider using max-width in your stylesheet so you can limit the width to 1000-1200 pixels.
  2. Use a generous line-height. 140% is a good rule of thumb. Too much and you risk your visitors’ eyes getting lost. Too little and your text will be unreadably squashed.
  3. Colour contrast is good! Dark grey (not black) on white is best, and dark on light is easier to read than light on dark.
  4. Never ever ever use Comic Sans MS. Ever.
  5. Small text is not good. Yes, it’s good for your meta data, but it’s not good for your main body text. If you do insist on using small fonts, at least size them in a unit other than pixels so all your visitors can resize your text as needed.
  6. Allow plenty of space between blog entries. If you’ve spaced out your text, you should space out your entries. Whitespace is good - cramped blogs are not.
  7. Never use more than three different fonts. One font is best, two fonts is acceptable, but three’s a crowd. Instead, try experimenting with font-variations, font-weights, colours, and sizes. You’ll be surprised what you can achieve.
  8. Don’t type all in capitals. Capital letters on the web implies that you are yelling at your readers. Do not yell at them!

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