Marketing Medical Practices On The Internet: Line Length and Content-Rich Websites

One of the best approaches to marketing medical practices on the Internet is creating websites that are rich in content. This is particularly true when it comes to marketing plastic surgery practices. Many potential plastic surgery patients use the Internet to search for information before deciding to go ahead with a particular procedure. You can draw these people to your site by creating content- and keyword-rich pages.

However, websites that have a lot of content and text can be somewhat challenging. Content on a website can prove hard to read because of the default structure of an HTML document. Further, reading on a computer screen is much harder on the eyes than reading on paper. Studies have proven that people don’t read information on the Internet like they do on paper. Rather than reading every single word and sentence, they tend to scan pages instead. As such, it’s important that the content on your pages be designed to accommodate the way that people read on the Internet.

One very helpful tip when it comes to content-rich pages is to limit the length of your lines. Print publishers have long known that blocks of text are easier to read when limited to around 65 characters per line. 65 is an average and you may, in fact, see anywhere from 50 to 80 characters per line. Consider your average newspaper in which the text is broken up into as many as six columns across the width of the page. Now consider how much more difficult that text would be to read if it ran the entire length of the page. When lines contain more than 80 characters, they can prove very hard to follow. You’re likely to have trouble finding the beginning of the next line once your eyes have gotten to the end of a line. It’s also important, however, that you don’t make your lines too short as very short lines force the eye to continually scan back and forth.

Basic HTML text tags don’t allow for the control of line widths, instead running lines of text until they reach another page element or the end of the browser window. To combat this problem, text can be placed into an HTML table to limit the width of each line. By using HTML tables, the page can be divided into two or more columns with the key content set within the widest column. Not only does this make the content far easier to read, it also allows for related links and navigation elements to be placed in the other columns.