Lipstick on a Pig: Good Site Design for Bad Text Content

Apr, 13 2009

 

As the World Wide Web matures, our ideas of good website design mature with it. We have learned the importance of easy navigation, ample use of white space, and a minimum of distracting bells and whistles. We have to capture a viewer’s attention inside a small window of time. Our choices in design must be pleasing, purposeful, and digestible, not overwhelming.

 

Even the best site design sometimes fails to capture viewers because the content is not equally effective. Text will quickly turn viewers off if it is too dense, repetitive, irrelevant, or just plain wrong.

 

In online documentation (and particularly in the era of information overload) the goal is to convey ideas as clearly as possible. This means using direct language. Eliminate jargon, extra words, and redundancies. Many people think that writing well means sounding like an 18th century philosopher. Lofty words and fancy constructions are pretentious. They often create unnecessarily complicated text and lead to embarrassing errors. So, unless you are a poet or a novelist (and even then you may want to reconsider), it is better to keep it simple.

 

Keeping it simple also means limiting words. When a reader’s eyes move from the top to the bottom of your site, they will move faster with more spacing after lines and between. This white space gives the sense of a quick read, which matches well the lack of attention many visitors bring to your website.

 

Organize text visually to maximize quick comprehension and give the reader this breathing room. Long, dense paragraphs are heavy on eye lids. Nothing makes a reader lose interest more quickly than having to wade through them. Combining short paragraphs with bulleted lists, tables, and graphs can be very effective in presenting large amounts of information efficiently.

 

It is also important that the text be relevant to the core concept of the page on which it appears. For example, the Services page probably should be about Services, rather than about both Services and the CEO’s dog. If you have the right text on each page, you can also avoid repeating text on several pages. Most readers get it if you tell them once, and if you need to repeat text as filler, you may want to reconsider how much you really have to say.

 

Don’t forget to proofread. Once you have streamlined your language, made efficient use of your space and eliminated all redundancies, nothing undermines credibility faster than grammatical and punctuation errors in text you’ve displayed to the world as a finished product. There’s no sense in going to the trouble of creating a dynamite site and then failing at the finish line by looking sloppy or ignorant.

 

Effective site design and text go hand in hand, and neither is sufficient alone to create a positive impact. Truly great websites are elegantly simple and put together flawlessly - in navigation, appearance, and text. Otherwise, you might as well just put lipstick on a pig.