Internet Marketers: Take a typography lesson.
I’ve become something of a internet/information marketing connoisseur as of late, ever since I started becoming interested in Fabienne Fredrickson’s Client Attraction. And there really is some great stuff out there to learn about marketing as it applies to small businesses. But here’s the thing. Why do so many of these sites have to be so—I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feeling but I just have to say it—why do they have to be so ugly? And why do they have to be so LONG?
I just learned from a colleague, Jeff Marden (Marden Consulting), that there’s a trend of how users scan pages when deciding whether they’re going to read them or if they’re going to bounce right back out of them. The traditional scanning shape is an F: their eyes go across the top of the page, from left to right, then scroll vertically from top to bottom, and then scan the middle of the page: again, from left to right. The newer trend, Marden told me, is to look at the scroll page immediately after scanning the top, header area of the page. If your page has a huge scroll on it, they usually leave right away without reading it all.
And the typography… I’m not even sure where to start. Why all the centering? I find centering annoying and really hard to read. It just screams “amateur.” It doesn’t look good, and it’s not doing anything for your credibility. Get a respectable font. Don’t put everything in the same font, either. Kill Verdana—it just looks so Microsoft. Use two fonts; maybe a serif and a sans-serif. Try Arial or Helvetica for the headers, bump it up nice and big, and try Georgia for the copy. It’s elegant and easy to read.
I’ve long wanted to go on a web-beautifying kick. I love to look at a bad website and take on the mental design challenge of picking out three ways to instantly improve it. I see websites that I know small businesses have paid good money for—probably $3K to $5K—and, quite frankly, they look amateur and dodgy. Do you want credibility? Does your web site scream “professionalism” or “Look what I created last night?” Just because you can do it yourself, can you do it well?
