As an award-winning website design company in Surrey, Thunderbolt Digital are all too familiar with the process of designing and developing stunning bespoke websites for our clients. Of course, business owners won’t be as familiar with the process, and may prioritise certain elements to the detriment of others – such as copy.
When designing a new website, companies will already be picturing how it will end up, and will be looking to ensure that their layout is clear and that colour palette reflects their brand without being overbearing. However, very little thought may be put into font design outside of the fact that it will need to be legible – as always, though, it is never quite that simple!
Good designers know that more thought needs to be put into copy than you might originally assume, and this becomes evident when you analyse some of the top performing homepages on the web. In fact, you may start to notice some patterns, such as:
- Sans Serif fonts are by far the most popular. These fonts give a page a clean, fresh look and have the desirable trait of being more readable even on lower resolution displays.
- Pure black and white are hardly ever paired together when it comes to copy; this is due to the colours forming too harsh of a contrast that can cause eyestrain. Designers often work around this issues by using different shades of grey (or cream) instead – these shades still look black (or white) to the naked eye, but are much more readable.
- Bigger is better. Whilst the “standard” font size for the main body of many printed documents is 12pt, the same cannot be said for web design. In fact, the most popular size for regular copy was 14px (roughly 10.5pt), though it could be argued that old rules die hard, as the second most popular size was 16px (12pt), followed by 13px (10pt).
- You can have too much of a good thing. You will want to ensure a good ratio of copy to images and other elements, so that users can be informed without being overwhelmed. The average word count for homepages came to 605 words, to keep things well-balanced.