A sensible max-width and line-height can do wonders for readability, to the point that there are "reading mode" extensions that do pretty much just that.
This site has main.max-width = 34em and line-height = 1.5 which is a good choice in my opinion.
There also seems to be some nice vertical rhythm going on with the paragraph and title spacing.
Yeah its time for that person to take a marketing class.
Despite my website having best-in-class content, it took a custom wordpress theme for people to begin taking it seriously/sharing. My conversion doubled overnight.
That's quite a claim. I'm not sure which website is your's so I can't dispute it. Personally, I frequent websites with higher quality content and avoid "gotta-sell-you-something" sites.
Also, as another commentor mentioned: > It sounds like you applied styling to improve your conversion rates
Are you annoyed that you just received Hackers News, which is a piece of marketing for Ycombinator?
"But that's the last 2 generations did things, I can't possibly imagine any other way for life to work"
We don't talk about providing value in academia, I assume they don't talk about providing value in philanthropic organizations or political movements. Whenever I hear the term it essentially means "to make money".
I appreciate that this is my personal interpretation of this though
I am not surprised. The requirement to provide value in academia would go very much against getting any funding for it.
Please don't encourage people taking advertising classes. The internet needs less marketing not more.
ugh, please justify !
If it is the hardest to read, why is it used in print? What distinguishes print from electronic media that means that justification works in one place but not the other?
I would be particularly interested to read anything recent that considers legibility in print, the advent of high pixel density displays, and the impact of good justification such as that offered by microtype.
I'm slightly biased here: I believe that justification has got a bad reputation due to how badly web browsers (especially Chrome which doesn't even support hyphenation) handle it.
Browser are pretty bad typesetting engines. Word breaking doesn't work very well, they don't and can't do protrusion or expansion. The low resolution of displays means you microadjustments don't really work, because they at most slightly shift contrast from one anti-aliased edge to the opposing edge.
Justified text works very well if you're able to competently apply all those techniques (e.g. MS Word and similar document editors didn't do any of that for a long time).
Bad justification results in rivers, uneven spacing, broken edges etc.
In Grid Systems in Graphic Design (1981) the author argued against justification because he thought having spaces of different lengths between words created a poor rhythm (I will find the exact quote tomorrow).
I do think multi-column layouts are sorely underutilised on the web. Modern websites make a mockery of desktop wide-screen displays where they use about a quarter of the screen and fill the rest with adverts.
Maybe I'm just a contrarian.
Browsers are indeed bad at it, but we don't need fully justified text in the first place. For me personally, I prefer varying line lengths because I can easily keep track where the previous line was.
https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/93429/why-is-text-jus...
https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/24025/should-text-on-...
Thank you for taking the time to respond, though. I had not heard the columns-as-line-separators argument before, but I'm not sure I buy it as most books are justified but do not use multiple columns.
> with tons of displays we can't be sure how the text will look fully justified.
This argument could be applied to ragged text, too. Are you saying that you can't be sure how it looks and therefore you can't justify it? The answer then seems to simply be "compute the layout on the client", as is done anyway.
> Are you saying that you can't be sure how it looks and therefore you can't justify it?
No, I'm saying it's unpredictable so we should avoid using it, while left aligned text is the default that works best in any circumstance.
Huh? I would think that, for every fully justified line there’s a left-justified one with the same content that is, at worst, equally wide, but typically less wide.
I think full justification traditionally is done for aesthetics, possibly with a bit of “look what we can do” added (it takes a better typesetter to set a line fully justified than it does to set a left-justified one with equal-sized spacing, even when both cases use kerning)
Justification makes sense when you can hyphenate words, that way you can pack more letters, otherwise the whole word would break into the next line.
”In left-aligned text, hyphenation evens the irregular right edge of the text, called the rag.”
Laptops tend to have the ability to conveniently adjust brightness, but then everyone went with ambient light sensors, and because they’re really pretty terrible at getting it right, laptop and OS manufacturers opted for erring on the side of excessive brightness, and so laptop screens are normally somewhere between too bright and way too bright.
Desktop screens tend to be hard to adjust the brightness of, because the physical unit’s OSD approach to changing brightness is awful, and OS vendors haven’t hooked anything helpful into it for reasons that quite escape me. So most people still have their screens set at the default brightness level, which is way too bright for anything but direct sunlight.
I remember with fondness CRTs that had a physical brightness dial that you could turn. So much better than what we have now.
Phone screens… yeah, they’re normally too bright too for similar reasons to laptops. Again I criticise ambient light sensors.
I went to quite some length to get the screen brightnesses for my Windows laptop and the external displays I normally use even vaguely sane, involving obscure freeware from ten years ago and deep diving into Windows APIs; there are basically two different APIs for working with display brightnesses: laptops’ internal displays use one, and external displays use the other (the internal display is also available through the other, but it doesn’t actually work for changing brightness). Said other API which external monitors need is exposed absolutely nowhere in any UI at all. (Windows basically lies about being unable to adjust brightness of external displays in its Settings app.) Screen-brightness-adjusting keys don’t seem to be interceptable (no hooking onto XF86MonBrightnessUp and XF86MonBrightnessDown as I did on my previous, Arch Linux, laptop), so your only recourse for linking the external displays’ brightness would be detecting the internal monitor’s brightness changing and effecting. (Incidentally, the jump from 0% brightness to 10% brightness is consistently massive on LCDs; I worked around this on Linux by making a logarithmic scale wrapper around xbacklight, but I can’t fix that conveniently on this laptop.)
At present, I just type “b 0”, “b 40” or whatever into Command Prompt and it invokes a CLI-based external-screen-brightness-adjusting program.
In my home office, my external displays normally operate at 20–40% brightness during the day, though I’ve gone up to 70% on occasion before, and 0% brightness during the evening (and I’d prefer −20–−10%; most screens’ minimum brightness is unreasonably bright).
It’s not anyone’s job as a web designer to insist they're wrong.
I will continue to recommend that people reduce their brightness in almost all cases. That’s my job as a friendly person.
As a web developer, though, there is little scope for insisting that they’re wrong, which is why I say we have to take most people’s badly configured monitors into account.
But this goes both ways. I've seen developers complain about the W3C accessibility standards on contrast because it looks too severe on their retina display full-brightness Macbook.
But the relative cost of having too much contrast (it's uncomfortable to read, but still perfectly legible) and the relative ease of fixing it (turn down your laptop brightness) is very minor when compared against the many people with crappy, low-light displays that can't adjust their brightness or fix the problem of low contrast text.
Often what people mean when they say to optimize for what people have is that they'd prefer to optimize for the highest quality devices first. But for a nontrivial number of websites and demographics, those devices are the minority, and in those situations high-contrast black-on-white text will look better on a wider variety of the devices that ordinary people are using.
If high contrast is painful to look at, and you can't control web designers throughout the world, but you can control your own web browser... then why are you still suffering?
Just off-black on a slightly creamy white.
May even stick with #000 for text.
Giving users ability to select a white, off-white, inverse, or solarised scheme is also useful.
See also https://contrastrebellion.com
My variant:
That's something I'm going to keep in mind.