Why are content-focused websites so hard to read?

Posted: November 23rd, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Notes | Tags: , , | 3 Comments »

Brent Simmons made the mistake of going to a website centered around text because he wanted to read said text. The problem isn’t the text or content it self — it’s often quite good — but rather all the junk that surrounds text and content: annoying ads, social sharing buttons, too many extraneous features and links and images to other content on a website. It’s nothing like reading a magazine or book, which let the content speak for itself.

Simmons recounts the horror that he saw:

I couldn’t hit the Reader button in Safari fast enough. In fact, I couldn’t hit it at all, so stunned was I by the flickering colorful circus the page presented. It was like angry fruit salad on meth.

I was there because I just wanted to read something. Words. Black text on a white background, more-or-less. And what I saw — at a professional publication, a site with the purpose of giving people something good to read — was just about the farthest thing from readable.

If you have a website focused on content — especially journalism and information — why do you make it so hard for people to read your content? The answer is that you shouldn’t.

 

  • Chris Henn

    I agree that text heavy sites make it hard to focus on the content, but print magazines aren’t any better. They still have a ridiculous amount of ads, and tricky page layouts (with a few exceptions like The New Yorker.)

    • http://twitter.com/pwthornton Patrick Thornton

      I think print magazines are better, sometimes much better. Magazines like The Economist have tasteful ads that are interesting to look at and read. Very few news websites have ads that are enjoyable to look at it.

      I guess it depends on the publication, but very few news websites do ads well. Most are actively user hostile.

  • http://twitter.com/craigorland Craig Orland

    and yet, even this webpage has a problem imho, your quote from Simmons above, slightly darker gray text on a gray background, tsk tsk…. :)