Creating Readable Pages

Creating readable pages is important when marketing plastic surgery practices on the Internet. A good website for your plastic surgery practice is one that has lots of content. Lots of keyword-rich content can help your search engine rankings, and valuable content can satisfy potential patients searching for information about plastic surgery procedures and plastic surgeons. For those potential patients, however, it’s also important that you supply all of this content in the form of readable pages.

Studies have shown that reading on a computer monitor is far different than reading printed material. The monitor is more strenuous on the eyes, requiring more effort and concentration, than the printed page. Further, a good amount of your targeted audience is aged 50 and older. In fact, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, 59% of all facelift patients in 2004 were aged 51 to 64, as were 52% of all forehead lift patients. And in the same year, 26% of all hair transplantation patients were aged 51 to 64 and 29% were aged 65 and older. These two age groups are often associated with vision problems, thus further stressing the need for readable web pages.

In order to satisfy your site visitors and keep them coming back for more, keep the following in mind when creating web pages for easy readability:

• Use high contrast colors. Though often ignored, a high contrast between your text color and background color is one of the important aspects of easy readability. The very best combination is a dark colored text like black set against a light colored background like white. A light colored text can also be set against a dark colored background, but this does prove somewhat more challenging on the eyes.
• Use a proper font size and font type. Choose a font type and font size that is easy to read. Your font size should be neither too small nor too large, and your best bet is too use a font type that is standard, even simple. Also be consistent with your fonts and use the same size and type throughout all of your pages.
• Be clear and concise . Given that reading online is more of a challenge, make sure that your content is clear and to-the-point. When reading on the web, people tend to scan a page rather than read each word. You can make your pages scannable by highlighting important points using bulleted lists and headlines. You can also highlight important text and break up section with different colors, a larger-sized font or a different (though still complimentary) color. Don’t let important information get lost within large blocks of text.
• Test your pages. To ensure that your pages look and function properly for the majority of your users, be sure to test them in different browsers, on different monitors and computers, and at different screen resolutions.