Archive for the ‘Web Site Usability’ Category

One of my favorite things to do is to surf real estate web sites for different areas. Currently, I am daydreaming about living in the North Carolina Mountains.

This morning, I ran into two issues (on two different sites).

On one site, the text descriptions of the houses (a VERY important part of any RE site and its content) were done in black on white (almost always a good choice) BUT in italic! It is EXTREMELY difficult to read paragraphs worth of italics!

So… when SHOULD you use Italics?

At this point, the majority of web site content is text. Additionally, most LINKS are underlined to show that they are clickable. As a result of that combination of circumstances I recomend the following:

• Limit Underlining ONLY to links (I do the same in my paper writing, as well)
• Limit Italics to brief usage (such as word or phrase or, rarely, a sentence). To make it easier to read, combine Bold and Italic.
• Use Bold for emphasis, especially for longer passages such a paragraphs, because it is easy to read.
• Avoid colored text unless you have chosen a font color and background color combination that has good contrast and is easy to read.
• Be sure that the Text size is reasonably large or else it may be hard to read.

Check your site in different browsers… and ask you customers/clients if it looks good to them!

This will remind them of your site, get them engaged, and, we hope, will alert you to any problems you may not be aware of!

If they can’t read your site… you are in TROUBLE!

Sharing the Road to Success!

Tink

PS- I’ll talk about the second issue I saw later on this week ;-)