In order for your eye to easily follow one line to the next, you want no more than 75 characters in each line. Here’s another little-known rule that a lot of blogs break. Why risk losing so many readers? Black or very dark gray on white looks clean, and there are plenty of great themes that use those colors.

Depending on what research you consult, studies show that light on dark text reduces your readership between 50% and 400%. Staring at reversed text for an extended period tends to create a kind of “glare” effect, where you feel like the letters are too bright to look at.

Reversed type reduces not only the number of people who’ll bother to read your content, but also their comprehension of it. As are variants like white on some other dark color. But white on black text, known as reversed type, is still pretty common. Use dark on light text-reversed is no goodįortunately we’ve pretty much moved past the days when content authors thought that fuchsia on blue text was cool. It looks big at first, but once you use it you quickly realize why all browser makers chose this as the default text size. But after a day, you won’t want to see anything smaller than 100% font-size for the main text. It’s just a stupid collective mistake that dates back to a time when screens were really, really small … At first, you’ll be shocked how big the default text is. There is no reason for squeezing so much information onto the screen. Many people-especially those over 40-find it very difficult to read smaller text. That’s the default size for most magazines, as well as all word processors, because it’s the size people find most comfortable to read. 16px text on an average screen looks about the same size as 12-point text in print. Similarly, if you randomly sample offerings from the popular Elegant Themes or ThemeForest, you’ll find that every single theme sets post content at 12 or 13 pixels.Īnd of course, other theme creators tend to follow the lead of the bigwigs.īut as usability and typography expert Oliver Reichenstein of Information Architects points out, 16 pixels is the font size that browsers were intended to display by default-and it is not big.

A random sampling of new blog designs at SiteInspire (a web design gallery showcasing the best of the best designs) shows that the average font size for body copy is 12 pixels. Back in 2005, Jakob Nielsen reported that in a survey of web design problems, bad fonts got nearly twice as many votes as the next contender-with two-thirds of voters complaining about small font sizes. Font size-16px minimumĪt the very top of the the pile of legibility problems is font size. So in this article, I’ll give you the five most important best practices for presenting text to keep readers glued to your content, and away from the old back button. And if you’re not making that mistake, you’re probably making at least one of four others. How huge? Well, by some accounts I’ve read, just one common mistake with colors could reduce readership by a factor of five. You may not realize it, but the font settings on your blog can have a huge effect on how many people read your content.Īnd how many people read your content has a huge effect on whether a post goes viral. This guest post is by Bnonn of Information Highwayman.

Best fonts for blogs