5-10 seconds, that’s how long you have to capture a readers attention.

The internet gives us so many choices that if something isn’t particularly interesting it takes less effort to leave and find something new than it would to actually read through. This is why we need to seize every advantage we can. In web design much emphasis is placed on styles and imagery but more often than not these are overly artistic and not designed with a human in mind.

So what does a human look for? First it’s all about open              space. Lots of spacing makes information more accessible.

                                                           Then the reader searches in a pattern much like reading usually starting at the top left
then working their way to the bottom right.

What else is important, how about font. Some users still have back-lit screens making artistic fonts more difficult to read such as

Georgia or Times New Roman

The best text to use is the defacto font of the United States government. When you see a STOP sign or any road sign it’s written in sans-seriff. Newspapers use this font also because of the split second chance to capture an eye, the simpler the text the more effective the message written in the text. So don’t bunch a lot of text together, space out your information in a coherent way and use simple fonts like seriff, helvetica, arial or verdana and you’re sure to gain the attention of your readers.

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