Text-heavy pages 2

[doctorChuckles]

Greetings,

I'm a do-it yourself web author, admittedly rather a novice.

I hope this is the right forum for web-page design issues. I looked around and couldn't find a better one. Let me know if I'm OT.

Most of the pages on my site are text-heavy. That's unavoidable. I know enough to keep them reasonably short and to control the line length, and to break the text up with headings. I also have larger initial caps, in a dark color, instead of black, at the beginning of each paragraph. That's a start, but it's not good enough.

I'm looking for good examples of how designers have handled text-heavy pages, to make them as attractive as possible. I've personally invented many ways to do that badly. The grass growing in the background-image, for example!

I'd sure appreciate it if a few subscribers would post some URLs of good examples.

Thanks in advance.


Tim

 

[Vragabond]

I feel you might get better ideas at forum253.

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[traingamer]

An excellent question. I think you need to limit the width to a maximum size and to make certain that you have a high contrast between the type and the background (White on black or black on white, etc.)
If the pages are extremely long, provide anchors / links for jumping to / returning from various parts of the page (unless it is a novel or story that needs to read sequentially).
I tend to break break things into multiple pages (sometimes artificially) rather than leaving as one big page. In the cases where it is a complete article with no logical break points, I may adjust the spacing between paragraphs, lines or even letters for better readability.


Some references:
Web Quality - Readability
Readability Test
Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design

Google "web site readability" .

Greg
"Personally, I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught." - Winston Churchill

 

[doctorChuckles]

Thanks to all on this thread. Apparently, I've posted on the wrong forum. I've re-posted the message on forum253: web site designers. If you want to reply, it might be better to reply on that forum.

I appreciate the suggestions so far, but they're not quite the help I need. I think the readability issues are under control. It's the attractiveness issue that concerns me. Traingamer's suggestions are excellent, but I've addressed those issues already.

As far as I can tell, attractive text-heavy pages are broken up by decorative or design elements, but I'm not finding many examples of how to do that well.


Cheers,


Tim