Copywriting Beyond Words - #1
There are a lot of things that affect people’s reactions to what they see on a sales page.
Words, surely. And along with words, people use size, font “decorations”, font weight, font color and the like to change how things appear on the webpage. With cascading style sheets (css), webdesigners can make placements onto webpages down to the pixel. Line spacing, justification, first line indents — the choices go on and on.
Of course, that raises another issue: once a page is designed — pictures and font decisions, centering text or not — will it look the same on all web browsers? Wait! All web browsers might be a bit of an impossibility, at least within a reasonable time & cost constraint.
So let’s step back, before we go too, deeply, and start looking at this problem a bit more simply.
But not too simple.
After all, If I provide you a page of black text, with one font and only enough variety with capitalization to make your 8th grade grammarian teacher happy — you probably will not find the page as interesting as you would with more variety. It wouldn’t be as interesting as it might if I use such things as: bolding text; capitalizing some words; making some parts of the text centered, other parts left-justified; using different colors of text.
Within reason, of course. Too much variation, and visitors can get overwhelmed. Too busy, and visitors can not easily reach into your design and connect with your message. Too crowded, and the reader can feel suffocated.
What’s reasonable? How much is enough to make the text interesting, but not so much as to be, well, offensive. Off-putting.
While there are many aspects we could discuss, let’s just take two that reportedly make text more interesting. Granted, at least one of them I’m not doing in this blog at this time. And that is first line indents. I did change it on another blog I recently started. I think it makes things more pleasant to read — what about you?
The other is justification. It’s been reported that “ragged right” (aka “left justification”) helps to prevent “eye fatigue”. Anything that makes it easier for readers to view the page should be done. Who knows at what point just a subtle bit of eye fatigue distracts the visitor from your page — never to return again?
Tags: beyond words, copywriting, eye fatigue, font decoration, left justification, ragged right, visual attractiveness