I have been editing and writing more blogs than I could have possibly imagined lately and that led me to a little digging 
Blog readability is important and when I say readability I am not talking about the design or the layout but your actual words. I recall having a discussion with Sally Church nearly three years ago about a widgety gadgety thing that measured the reading age of your blog. What it did was scan your blog posts and determine the average age of the reader of your posts, with the goal being to get to college level reading so you could reach the widest possible audience.
For those of you that know Sally and read her blogs you will know she is a pharmaceutical marketer and her blogs can contain a huge amount of long unpronounceable words, you will also know she writes in a style that enables non medical profession readers to understand the complexities of various cancer treatments and the impact of cancer drugs.
Not at any point is it ‘dumbed’ down – it’s written in a way that engages and informs as well as being written at a good level – meaning her blog gets the maximum amount of readers possible for it’s niche.
In the past I have thought writing to a specific reading age meant dumbing down your content, but as Sally demonstrates it doesn’t and whilst the reading age of her blog may be higher than mine, it’s written in intelligible language Remember if you want people to bookmark and talk about your blog and encourage people to visit it and comment, they have to understand what they read – even if it’s not their field of interest.
Is this something you could do for your blog?
Have you done the test yet? Want to share your blogs readability with us?
Sarah
PS this blog’s results are -
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=7d07a8ab-b529-4302-98cf-837530758a3f)
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I so agree with you Sarah, but possibly not for the reason you may already assume.
Of course the words are of paramount importance but what good are they if the text (typeface) of the blog/website is so small it’s very difficult to read without ‘zooming’ the page up large and then having to constantly use the scroll bar to gather all the information. Oh how I wish web designers would pay more attention to fonts and font size. I also wish more web designers understood that those who suffer with dyslexia find ’round’ fonts such as arial and a ‘ragged’ right margin much easier to read.
Take the ‘Birds on the Blog’ Blog for instance… what a great blog and what a great blog format it had, yes had. It was great until just recently they decided to change the template. Disaster, I don’t read it anymore becase the font is so small, the column layout of the blog is distracting and nothing is easy to find anymore. Please, please Sarah can you not persuade them to revert the the wonderful, clear, easy to read layout? I will then return to read as a devoted follower. I’ll be able to enjoy the content again, so don’t say never mind the layout, layout counts for a lot too.
Twitter: essex_courier
March 25, 2010 at 2:53 pm
Thank for you feedback Liz, it’s appreciated.
Did you subscribe to the feed via email via Birds on the Blog? That comes unformatted, and therefore much easier to read.
Of course there is the time old control and the + button to increase the font, which is what I use when reading pages with smaller fonts, not ideal but quick and easy to do.
I shall flag up font size with the Blogmistress, thank you for making us aware
{ 1 trackback }