Does Your Website Cater To An Aging Audience?

I was reading one of my favorite blogs the other day, Copyblogger, and James Chartrand had a great article about designing your website so it caters to an aging audience. His article struck home instantly as I find myself quite often in the same situation he describes in his article.

Does your website cater to an aging society? Well, I had to ask myself the same question. James recommends a 12pt or larger font size, black or very dark gray on a white background. First thing I did was check the CSS file in the new Revolution Theme I had just purchased and installed as I thought the font size was just a bit small.

The CSS said 12px or 12 pixels. Hmm…was that the same? I thought, no way, it’s just too small. So I changed it to 12pt or 12 points. Points is a unit of measure for measuring font size. Wow, that made a huge difference! And huge in the literal sense. It was too big, certainly James didn’t want me to make all the text on my beautiful new blog 12pt, it looked like everything was typed in bold. So what was I to do?

I decided to go somewhere in between. In playing around with different point sizes, I found that 12px was equal to 10pt. And 10pt was too small, 12pt was too big, 11pt must be just right. It’s 10% bigger than the 10pt but doesn’t look like I’m typing everything in bold.

If your audience includes people of like age to you and me (BOOMERS!!!), don’t forget that it’s a bit harder to read a computer screen than it was a few years ago. Our eyes have probably changed a little. Keep the background as white or a very, very, pale color, and always use black for your text. Gray makes us squint and if a customer starts to squint, they might just leave.

One other thing I don’t want to overlook, there may be a few places on your site where you have a heading, logo or graphic of some sort where you’ll want to use reverse color, or white text on a dark colored background. This is fine for graphics, but never, never, never, do white text on a color background for your body text. There is also one combination that you should never use as it just does crazy things to the eyes, young and old alike, never use red on a blue background. If you don’t believe me, try it, it doesn’t work.

P.S. I checked out James’ blog, Men With Pens, and he has a Revolution Theme as well, and it looks like he never changed his CSS file to 12pt. James…are you going to practice what your preach?

Reba

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