Spoke with a potential client today about his current website and a second one he was contemplating. His chief complain levied at his current site: It looks like Grandma’s Kitchen. It looked like it was designed in 1999 and hadn’t been touched since. His analysis was spot on. The content was fine, but it was presented in such a way that it’s wasn’t a pleasure to read.

While I agreed that the style was a poor choice for his business, my chief concern was the text. It was presented in paragraph form but it was so bunched together it was a big, low contrast, wall of mush. It is so important to present your content in an easy to digest way, especially on the web where you may only have someone’s attention for 10 seconds.

This client recognized that something was wrong because the overall look and design was antiquated, but would they have noticed if the design was clean and modern, but still had bad text formatting? Maybe something would have felt “off” but they can’t quite put their finger on it.

The next time you wonder about how you’re presenting your text, use my “Wander” test. Read the text, and pay attention to how often your eyes wander or stray away from the content. If you do it more than once every other paragraph, you probably need to change your formatting. Likewise if you find that you have to reread a section of text to understand it, your eyes may by giving up on you and looking for something they can grasp.