There are a lot of opinions as to how your website copy should be written with clear, concise and keyword rich generally considered as being amongst the most important, and it’s no secret that it should enable visitors to find information quickly and easily without having to wade through blocks of irrelevant text; so, pretty much straightforward so far.
But, those basics aside, what about the look of the copy, or more precisely, its shape? Shape is all important in website copy because if it’s not right it will simply put visitors off regardless of how good the web design of the site itself.
Ideally, blocks of website copy should be set as ‘justified left and ragged right’ which simply means that the left side of the block should be straight and the right side uneven – just like the copy on this page.
This is usually the most comfortable layout for online readers as there is a defined start to each line of text and ending where they would naturally finish without being broken up by the multiple hyphen breaks and oversized spaces found in justified text.
If you don’t already know, justified text is when both the left and right sides of the copy columns are straight just as they are in newspapers and many books, and whilst this works for those types of publications, it’s not something that’s appreciated or wanted by the majority of website visitors.
There are websites out there containing justified text and apart from the reasons I’ve mentioned, to me they’re also quite uneasy on the eye. Justified text on your website may look neat, tidy and uniform but visitors might have a hard time reading it and even leave your site because of it.
Until next time.
