Are you writing for The Wall St Journal or a supermarket tabloid?

As designers we all want to get 'the message' across to our visitors. The words we use and the way they are put together can have a dramatic effect on our success. How can we measure that success?

Let me introduce you to Robert Gunning. He was an American businessman who in 1952 created a way to measure the readability of text. This index of is known as the Fog index. I won't bore you with how it works but read the Fog index article on Wikipedia.

What does this mean for us?

If you use complicated words and long sentences, then it will be harder to read your copy. Your site may not communicate effectively.

If you have a Fog index of over 12, then you're going to lose a lot of your site visitors. If you have a Fog index of 8 or under then you can expect almost all people will understand it.

How do you calculate your readability score?

Get a block of your site text and go here Select 'Test by direct input' and paste your text into the window. Now press the 'Calculate Readability'.

The text above this sentence (minus links) has a Fog Index of 7.1 which means that 11 year olds should be in theory able to understand it.

Of course there are a lot of 'buts' and 'howevers' such as context and intended audience. A scientific site aimed at scientists (and nobody else) would need to use appropriate language.

General mass appeal websites ideally should aim at having simple easy to understand language on their site. This is of course a usability thing, 'use the simplest language possible'.

What does this mean in practice? Minimise the number of words that are polysyllabic (what???) Po-ly-syl-a-bic = 5 syllables, shorten your sentences


It is all too easy to get caught up in designing and building a site about a subject that we know very well and lose sight of what our audience actually know about that subject.

Checking the readability of your text will give you an objective, if abstract measure of how easy your content is to read. There are other measures of readability and other online checkers which may give varying results for a single block of text.

Did you know that almost all of todays blockbuster novel writers such as Dan Brown and JK Rowling write at the 7th grade level? (Source)

I hope this helps - along with the 1001 other things you need to do as a designer!

btw. I'm no exemplar of good readability!

Just tested this.....and I really like it. I've been telling a friend that his web content is way above the level required for the average customer he's trying to attract....and this tool proves it! I've done a comparison between 2 sites and the difference is amazing.

Thanks for the link.

mccifa

Brilliant!

I've just used read-able to rewrite the introduction to a series of books which are aimed at 6-12 year olds but written by a 54 year old engineer!

The danger is that it can get kind of addictive!

The only thing I'm addicted to is good wines, LOL! Cheers!

But, as a tool, I think your link could prove extremely useful in certain situations and very helpful to some people.

I'm always disappointed to see many 'good-looking' websites having dreadful text/content, full of spelling and punctuation errors. This does nothing to enhance their web experience IMHO....instead, it works to their detriment, though they never seem to realise that fact.

I've just been looking at http://scottishgamekeepers.com/.... a new site, produced by somebody who appears to not see the errors/problems in their site.

Even the lack of capital letters in certain places will be sufficient to annoy many visitors. So why do it?

Get a site as 'right' as possible and you stand so much more chance of getting visitors and (if required) doing business.

Recently, I offered to sort out a site with many mistakes....and they turned me down! A small fee would have secured a site which almost no-one could have criticised (my grammar ain't perfick!) but they decided to leave their site with some very basic grammatical and spelling errors. But what concerns me is that they will lose as a result of their seemingly complacent approach.

mccifa

Hi Geek and Dave.

I don’t waste my time with tools like that. My edumacation was so low, I qualify for the 6-12 year old category anyway, so my literacy skills are some what deflated.

And Dave, as far as punctuation and capitalization is concerned, there are very handy spelling and grammar checkers out there if people bothered to use them.

Not into wine, but love my beer and home made scotch.

Terry

ROFL! As high as 6-12 eh?! I might get that high on a good day.

When people write their own content that tool could be very useful to prove a point. I mean, they won't listen to me about colours, fonts etc but perhaps the text tool will help.

Home made scotch?!! Is it legal? If so, please send me the recipe/method, LOL! Used to make a lot of beer (which was good) and a lot of wine (which was pretty naff!).

mccia