The Importance of White Space in Your Web
Copywriting

by Bruce Carlson

Published on this site: June 16th, 2006 - See more articles from this month

Have you ever pulled up a Web page and gotten "stuck" before you could even read very far?

Chances are the writer didn't give your eyes the necessary space so you could take in the copy comfortably.

Writing for the Web requires a special kind of visual awareness.

But I'm not talking Web aesthetics here. Ugly Websites and Web pages can do quite well.

What I'm talking about is white space. Because of the nature of the medium, the human eye needs "rest stations" to keep it from getting overworked when reading a Web page.Putting in lots of white space provides those rest stops, and keeps your reader from clicking out because of "eye trouble."

White space includes things like variance in paragraph length. Shorter paragraphs are absolutely essential on the Web, but you have to intersperse shorter ones with longer ones to make it comfortable for your readers' eyes. You create a rhythm this way. And the eyes are drawn to this kind of comfortable copy.

I seldom read the old "academic style" articles with nothing but long paragrahs anymore. They actually hurt my eyes to read them.

A lot of writers are missing out on a really important aspect of Web writing. By just varying their paragraph length they'd make their articles much more accessible to readers.

You also need to vary your sentence length, for the very same reason you vary your paragraph length. The rhythm created by mixing short and long (but not too long) sentences is nice and pleasing to the eye and the mind.

White space also includes things like narrow margins. Any text that's more than 600 pixels wide on a Web page is going to be brutal to read. A big long headline that's too wide on the page is a disaster. In the old days, there were a lot of super-wide headlines and body text, as people transferred offline-style sales letters and other documents wholesale to the Web via a scanner.

But now people are coming around.

Keep those margins nice and narrow.

Sub-headlines do a lot to help your reader's eyes too, and so you should have sub-headlines at regular intervals throughout your copy. Insert a sub-headline every three to four paragraphs and you'll add a lot of white space.

Scan readers or skimmers who only read the headlines and sub-heads (and possibly the bolded and highlighted text) are white space-oriented readers. So the better use you make of any white space help, the more of those skimmers you'll bring in to your copy.

Color also comes into it. I'm no expert on which colors appeal best, but I do know that a plain old white background is easier on the eyes for text (think of print books). And since white is such a light color you then have to have a darker colored font. But you know that...

And make your fonts a decent size. Think of your older readers and how they might have difficulty reading tiny text. Also take a look at which style of font you use. I generally advise Web writers to use Times, Arial, Courier, or Verdana.

Fonts that work well for the Web and are easy to read.

The key here is awareness of your readers' visual limitations and needs. The way you learn about them is by studying your own. Think about what happens with your own eyes when you read a Web page.

Ok, so go back and take a look at your Web pages right now. Think in terms of white space.

What can you do to make the physical copy easier to look at and read?

Take responsibility for your reader's eyes. Consider that you, as a Web writer, need to make your chosen medium as accessible for your reader as possible.

Here's to white space!



Web copywriter Bruce Carlson would like to give you a free 10-page report packed with tips for building your Web business with better copywriting. Learn more here:
http://dynamic-copywriting.com/seventeentips