The most often asked formatting question is "How come when I hit Enter, it gives me a double line break?"

 

Single Line Break

Publishing for the Web is a little different that publishing an email or Word document.  If you would like just a single line break, just press Shift and Enter at the same time.

Don’t overformat

Many people are tempted to use every formatting option available. When they want to make text stand out, they’ll use bold, italics, different fonts, sizes, and colors – sometimes all at once!

This tends to result in a lot of visual clutter on the page. It’s hard to pick out the most important text because everything is styled to look like it’s important. The eye doesn’t know what to settle on because every piece of text is competing for attention.

Don’t center text

Centered text sometimes works well in print but it rarely looks good on a screen. This is especially bad for paragraphs when they eye has to jump back and forth to read each line. This puts stress on the reader and makes it more difficult to read your text. For example:

Centered

This an example of a centered paragraph of text. You can see that it is a little more difficult to read.
This way the eye has to jump back and forth to find the start of the next line before it can start reading.  This formatting may cause the visitor to skip over it.

Not Centered

This is an example of an uncentered paragraph of text. It is easier to read because the lines all start at the same spot. This way, the eye automatically knows where to go to find the start of the next line.  Much easier to read.

Centering headlines might work occasionally but also tends to have an unprofessional look. It gives the impression that you weren’t sure how else to format your text, so you used the most obvious option. This is the sort of thing you might have done on your first typed homework assignment – not on a website.

Summary

There are many things you need to consider when formatting text for your website. The best thing to do when starting out is to keep things as simple as possible. Don't mix fonts on your page, use bold and italic for emphasis, and make the headers a little bit bigger than body text. If your formatting is clean and simple, it will be easy for people to read your text – which is exactly what you want them to do!

 

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