We all know that designing a website is not an easy thing. There are a billion sites out there and we all want ours to be diferent. So we spend hours agonizing over selecting the right theme, picking out images and coming up with a pleasing color scheme.
I know how hard it is and I sympathize, but I am going to make a plea here for those of us with tired old eyes.
Now many, if not most, of you reading this are going to be quite a bit younger than I am. I am 54 years old and had Lasik several years ago. I mention this only so you know that my eyes are not what they once were.
While it is true that younger people make up much of the traffic on the ol’ World Wide Web, there are more and more of us old folk making our way online. And many older folk have money to spend.
As I make my way around the internet I will occasionally run into a page that I can see was put together by someone with really good eyesight. How do I know this? By the 10pt font they used to build it.
If the site is particularly good, I might make an effort to read for a bit, but it is much more likely that I will quickly lose patience and move on to the next site in the search results. You’ll see me in your bounce stats.
I would like to be able to tell you that the only thing you need to do to fix your site for me is to bump the size of the text up a notch or two, but there is one other thing.
When you are designing that beautiful site, trying so hard to come up with something that is different from every other site out there, please resist the temptation to use the light side of the palette. I get it, I really do. For some reason, light blue makes such a good complement to so many colors. It looks great, and to your eyes it is easy to read.
I’ll tell you what, when the light is really good and I have my screen tilted just the right way, I agree with you. The rest of the time, it is just too darn much work to decipher. The same goes for light yellow and light grey. Use these colors all you want in pretty pictures, but if you expect me to read your headlines or click on your links, sorry.
I am not telling you what to do. You go ahead and design your site however you want to. You decide who your audience is – I understand that there were even people who liked MySpace.
But if you want me and my cohort to spend a little money with you, you might want to jot down a note or two.
Remember, all those other sites looks the same for a reason.
