When you prepare a meal, it is not only the quality of the ingredients that make it a great treat. Its appearance is equally important and I realized that the same principle applies to a blog.
Great content is the core ingredient, the backbone of your message (pun not intended). But think about HOW to get the message across, not just WHAT.
When I was starting off with my blog I was fretting about the appearance of the text. Since I have learned from my own experience that some blogs have great content, they are often difficult to read due to a complex font or the font size. More often than not I was tempted to skip the text.
You don’t want that to happen to your blog.
But what is the ideal font and size?
Thanks to Google’s web fonts (they are free), there are more than 500 web-compatible fonts to choose from. They range from fancy to simple. Take into consideration the results of a neuromarketing experiment by the researchers Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz: They issued a set of the same instructions to two groups of people. Group 1 received the text in simple-, group 1 in fancy font. The results were astounding. Although the two groups have received the same instructions, group 2 took it twice as long to read (15.1 minutes vs 8.2). The first group was “significantly more committed” to the instructions.
The takeaway here is that simple fonts are more convincing.
But don’t forget the font size. As we get older, it becomes increasingly difficult to read small fonts. Not all your readers are in their twenties, remember! Size 12 is considered too small nowadays. 14 or 16 is increasingly becoming the standard for body text.
But again, place yourself on the other side of the fence. Play around with fonts and sizes and judge for yourself what your readers might find most appealing.
