Design for the Reader

Remember, your website is a publication and the people who come to it are readers. Therefore the first step in the design of any website is understanding who your reader is. Who is it that might come to your website? What content will they want if they do come? What are they going to read?

To design a great website, you also need to understand the characteristics of the online reader. They

• gather content—they know broadly what they are looking for but not exactly

• scan read—they are practical, impatient, in a hurry

• are skeptical and suspicious—they know there’s an awful lot of junk on the Web

• are conservative—once they find a website they like, they’ll stick with it

Any design must make sure that it is as easy as possible to read (black text on white background, sans serif fonts, reasonable font sizes, and so on). In addition, because people scan read, the presentation and layout of the content needs to facilitate such an activity (punchy headings, summaries, short paragraphs).