10 Things You Should Know About
How Your Viewer Sees Your Website!

copyright by Cheryl L. Coccaro

The way your website text appears can actually increase or worse, decrease your sales ratio. The size, font, style and color of your text can easily affect your viewer's buying decision.

I have listed below 10 points to consider when creating text on your web site.

• You want to make it easy for your visitors to read your text. Don't use a light colored text like yellow on a white background and you don't want to use dark blue text on a black back- ground color as it makes it difficult to read. #1 You want your site to be EASY TO READ.
• The mood of your web site is important for your viewer. If you are aiming for excitement, definitely use red. Now for those who are hungry for money, your obvious choice is....green! You would want to use colors that would put the viewer in a mood to buy your product so definitely CREATE A MOOD.
• Some viewers need some shock value and you can create that by using an attention getting headline. To make it more noticeable, use a colored background around the headline. Don't forget to indent and center your headline so the viewer's eye is drawn into your page to GET THEIR ATTENTION.
• Simply by emphasizing certain phrases and keywords that you feel are important. Using words like, super, deluxe, fast, free, low price, and new and choosing style elements like bold, underlining, color changing words and italics are good ways to HIGHLIGHT KEYWORDS.
• The size font that you choose to use should not be too large or too small. Save the use of larger text for the more obvious places like your title, headlines, and other heading. Remember that as we age, we prefer larger fonts for ease of reading, so SIZE UP YOUR FONTS ACCORDINGLY.
• Have you ever read someone's email and it has been typed in all capital letters. That is considered YELLING and is an immediate turn off to readers. Besides looking unprofessional, it is extremely difficult to read. It is acceptable to use all CAPS in your headline text and I recommend that you do not USE ALL CAPS!
• Do you have a particular font that speaks to you. You are absolutely in love with it and you use it exclusively on your page. Do you know that not all computers have every font that is available for use. Please use fonts that are standard and the FONT POLICE will not get you.
• When reading a page it is extremely important for the eye to have white space. When text is too cluttered and small and the text stretches across the screen, it fatigues the reader's eye. In this case you want to keep your viewer on your site or auction and if using white space helps, please use it and SPACE IT OUT!
• Don't use all bright text colors and backgrounds on your web site. It will make your text hard to read and actually bother your readers' eyes to the point they just decide to leave your site so just tell them that it's SUNNY OUTSIDE without using all the different colors of the rainbow.
• How well does your auction or web site text read. Have you used a spell checker? It is a little more difficult to check the grammar yourself, but sometimes reading the text out loud can assist you. So get your POINT ACROSS without attending summer school.

Why not review your auctions and web sites now and see if you are guilty of any of the above "no no's".