You only need to follow a few easy principles to produce great writing for either the web or print:
Users shouldn’t have to struggle, squint, or hunt for text. It should be easy and obvious.”
-Neville Medhora
The #1 thing is to use simple and time-tested fonts in your writing. My personal favorite is:
Font: Arial
Size: 12pt or 14pt
Color: Black
Arial is one of the default fonts that's on nearly every computer and phone on Earth, it's easy to read. You can see a visual demo of which font is easiest to read here.
Just use basic fonts that are simple and proven:
Some websites will put text from edge-to-edge on your screen. This is fine on a mobile phone, but if I'm viewing the page on a 27" iMac, I'll literally have to move my head back and forth to read which is really annoying.
The standard easy reading width is 960 pixels wide:
Images should be ultra-obvious about what's going on. Being "too clever" or "too deep" will make your writing less understandable. If you think an image is "soooo clever" it's probably just confusing to most people.
Like this author trying to convey sadness by showing an abstract painting that's supposed to represent sadness:
The image is just plain weird and difficult to understand. Instead the author should've just used a very simple image to convey sadness:
Instantly people understand the article has something to do with sadness because the image is so easy to understand.
Why are bullet points so awesome?
- They let readers easily understand multiple points.
- They can break up big blocks of text for easier reading.
- They be can used to list out a bunch of info
When companies hire me to help with cold emails and product pages, the first thing I'll do is go bulletize many of the interesting points in the copy.
Bullet points make the copy:
- Easier to read.
- More structured.
- More visually pleasing.
- Easier to skim through quickly.
Much of your traffic likely comes from people browsing on phones, so you need to also make sure everything looks good in mobile format.
For example when I originally made this post, the title just looked kinda wonky, so I modified it to look more normal just for mobile readers:
It's far more of a pain in the ass to make sure everything is formatted well for desktop AND mobile, but in the end it's more and more necessary to ensure both are readable.
Simply placing more space between content and new headlines can make a world of difference:
I add Emoji's on my Apple products by pressing:
CTRL + COMMAND + SPACE BAR
....and this Emoji menu appears:
You can use Emoji in normal sentences:
You can use Emoji for more attention:
⚠️ This is important ⚠️
You can use Emoji as bullet points:
You can even use Emoji as descriptive bullet points:
🇮🇳 India: 2.59 trillion
🇯🇵 Japan: 4.87 trillion
🇨🇳 China: 12.24 trillion
🇺🇸 USA: 19.39 trillion
You can use Emoji as arrows:
Elementary School → Middle School → High School → College
Elementary School ➡️ Middle School ➡️ High School ➡️ College
Elementary School 👉 Middle School 👉 High School 👉 College
You can be creative with text, and use it as art. For example you can make the text point at things:
In this example I am making the
text point downward so you
look in that direction
and are convinced
to click on the
join button
now
↓
I can also make bullet points look more attractive by putting them in order of length, like this:
See how that makes this list just slightly more interesting?
These are the simple guidelines I've seen improve countless webpages, I hope they are helpful to you!
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