Copywriting for SEO • Web Content Development
Make a Boomer's Day. Choose Larger Font Sizes.
by Katherine Andes
by Katherine Andes
"I always look forward to Katherine's Easy Web Tips. They really DO take almost no time to get through ..."
Peter Bowerman
Author Well Fed Writer
"... she always
shares something useful ... one smart tip a week, every week." Nick Usborne Author Net Words
"Thanks, also, for all the good advice you have shared with us over the past year."
Barry Hatch Managing Director Top Carpets
South Africa
Maybe I’m showing my baby-boomer age, but often I have to manually increase the size of fonts in web pages I open. And, that’s annoying.
Personally, I think designers tend to hate words, so they make fonts as small as possible.
Why even put words on a page unless they are meant to be read?
Remember, online reading speed is 25% slower than print because of the flicker of the screen. The irony is that computers have made us all ADHD — we have the attention span of a gnat. So we want to read faster, but we can’t!
Help your readers, especially your older disposable-income audience, along by making your fonts a little larger. It will also set you apart from most other web sites with their teeny tiny fonts.
SEO NOTE: I confess that as a search engine optimization (SEO) writer, I sometimes put words on a page targeted more for search engines to read rather than humans — like a list of cities served. Those listings, if located at an inconspicuous part of a page, can use a smaller font. The search bots don’t have an age problem. But the text should still be large enough to be readable for humans as well.
Easy Web Tip #86: Be different from other websites and use larger font sizes. Your readers will stick with your web pages longer.
