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What is it that makes a typeface into a text font, instead of a font for larger sizes? The answer differs slightly, depending on whether one aims for print or Web-based environments.

Nevertheless, there are certain features that most good text faces have in common. Familiarity with these helps to select the right fonts for a given project. This article presents a few criteria to help the process along.

Some of today’s most successful typefaces were designed to excel in very specific areas of use: Frutiger grew out of airport signage, Georgia and Verdana were among the first mass-market fonts created for on screen reading, FF Meta was conceived as a telephone book face, and even the Stalwart Times New Roman was tailored for the pages of the London Newspaper The Times. Many typefaces are also often fine-tuned for using in certain sizes.

It should be noted that in this article, when “text� is mentioned, it is in discussion of body text, or running text (in other words, text at a similar size to what you are probably reading right now, rather than much larger sized words).

Features Of A Good Text Typeface

The features outlined in this article are those that type designers keep in mind while developing new typefaces. It’s important to realize that these aspects of typeface design are different from the text treatment a graphic designer employs while laying out a book page or website—no matter what a typeface’s inherent rhythm and niceties are, setting a text is still something that must be done with great care in respect to readability. There are problems that good fonts themselves cannot solve—whether or not a text sings on the page or screen depends on factors like the width of the column, the amount of space between each line, the contrast between the foreground/background and a number of other factors.

Above, Bembo over the years: this typeface was a favorite of many book designers throughout the 20th century. At the top of the image is a scan of the original Bembo typeface, printed with letterpress. The digital version of the typeface—Bembo, seen in the middle, is too light for ideal text in print. A newer digitization was published in 2002—Bembo Book, seen at the bottom. This font is much darker, and is a better representation of the original Bembo idea. However, the middle version is still very elegant, and may still be used well in sub-headlines.

Every typeface has its own inherent rhythm, created by the designer who made the font. With typefaces that are intended for use in body text, it is primarily this rhythm that will make the typeface readable. But there are additional factors that go into the making of a good text face: the space between the letters, the degree of contrast in the letters’ strokes, as well as the x-height and relative size of the whitespace inside of the letters. Not every typeface that works well in text will apply all of these factors in the same way, but all good ones will have many of these features in common.

1. Stroke Contrast

When it comes to typefaces, the term “monolinear” is used to describe letters that appear to be designed with a consistent stroke thickness. Monolinear typefaces are low-contrast typefaces. Stroke contrast can be a helpful feature in small text sizes, but it is not paramount that a text face appears to be monolinear. Indeed, many newspapers employ high-contrast fonts; the question that must be considered is just how thick the thin strokes in high-contrast typefaces are.

The images in this section show different ends of the contrast spectrum: the Cycles types shown above are serifed, with a good deal of contrast. Sumner Stone’s Cycles typeface is an excellent choice for book design as its letter forms combine clarity with a rather high degree of stroke contrast and an almost timeless appearance. Five separate “versions” of Cycles are used in the above image; each block of text is set in its own optically-sized font.

Below, Avenir Next—also a great text face—is from another style of letter, and has very little contrast. I wouldn’t split good typefaces up into good contrast and bad contrast groups. Rather, some typefaces have a degree of contrast—be it too high or too low—that makes them less suitable for use in text. There is no definite rule on how much or how little contrast impacts a text face’s legibility. However, it is clear that both no contrast and excessive contrast can have adverse effects.

Geometric sans serif typefaces often appear to be monolinear stokes; their letters seem not to have any stroke contrast. In order to achieve this effect to the max, type designers have always made slight optical corrections. To look monolinear, a geometric sans needs some degree of thinning. In the image above, Planeta (left) is compared with Avenir Next (right). Both typefaces are more recent additions to the geometric sans category than stalwart faces (like Futura), or classic display designs (like ITC Avant Garde Gothic). Planeta has no visible stroke contrast, which must be a conscious decision on the part of its designer. While this does give it a unique style, it makes the face less suitable for text than Avenir Next, which is actually not as monolinear as it appears at first glance.

2. Optical Sizes

The Garamond Premier typeface family features different versions of each font. These variants are tailored for use in a certain size range. Above, the Display font (left) is compared with the Caption font (right). The Display font is optimized for texts that will appear in very large point sizes, while the Caption font has been optimized for very small text.

In her book Thinking with Type, Ellen Lupton writes:

“A type family with optical sizes has different styles for different sizes of output. The graphic designer selects a style based on context. Optical sizes designed for headlines or display tend to have delicate, lyrical forms, while styles created for text and captions are built with heavier strokes.�

The intended size of a text should be considered when selecting the typeface: is the typeface you want to use appropriate for the size in which you need to set it? Does the family include optical sizes (that is, different versions of the typeface that are tailored specifically for use at different sizes)? As with each of the factors mentioned in this article, the size at which a font is set can make or break your text.

In many ways, it is easiest to see the qualities necessary for good text faces by comparing potential selections with “displayâ€� faces. Like the term “text,â€� “displayâ€� refers to the size at which a specific font may best be used. In print media, as well as in many screen and mobile-based applications, the term “displayâ€� is often analogous with “headlines.â€� If a typeface that you are considering looks more like something that you might like to use for a headline, it won’t be the best choice for body text.

In the comparison image below, the Garamond Premier Display font has a tighter rhythm than the Caption font—not as much space is necessary between letters when they are set in large point sizes. Why should one consider type families with optical sizes, anyway? Well, as users bump up the point size of digital fonts, the space between letters increases in equal proportion. This inter-letter space slowly becomes too large, and makes a text feel like it is breaking apart. When a proper text font is set large, it may require some tighter tracking. Typeface families that offer optically-sized variants of their styles play a helpful role here.

In the image above, the first line of text—“Stanley Morisonâ€�—is set in the Garamond Premier Display font, while the lines of text underneath it are set in Garamond Premier Caption. Each font is balanced for its size, and they also harmonize well with one another. In another image (below), these fonts have been switched: the headline is now set in the Garamond Premier Caption font, and the text in the Garamond Premier Display. The letters in the Caption face look too clumsy when they are set so large, while the Display fonts’ letters appear uncomfortably thin in a “textâ€� setting.

The amount of stroke contrast visible in caption-sized fonts is much lower than in display-sized fonts. If the Garamond Premier Display font (from the above image) was rendered in a smaller point size, its thin strokes would begin to break apart, making the text unreadable. But this would not occur with the Caption version.

Garamond Premier Caption can robustly set real text, even in poor printing conditions. How well a font will render in small sizes on screen depends on the operating system and applications in question. Font formats themselves also play a role; in certain environments, TrueType fonts with “hinting� information may vastly improve on screen display (see the “Hinting� section at the end of this article).

3. x-Height

Garamond Premier’s Display face (above left) is shown next to the Caption face (above right). Both fonts are set at the same point size. The Caption face features a much higher x-height than the Display font.

Many successful text faces feature high x-heights; this means that the ratio of the central vertical area of lowercase letters—the height of the letter x, for instance—is large when compared to the length of the ascenders and descenders. Depending on its design, a text face may have a low x-height and still be quite legible. But the benefit of incorporating a large x-height in a design is that it maximizes the area of primary activity.

A high x-height may also prevent some letters, like the a or the s, from appearing to become too dark; these two letters have three horizontal strokes inside the x-height space, which is a very small area in text sizes. In order for letters to maintain clarity and understandability, they must have a consistent rhythm, as well as include large, open forms.

4. The Spaces Inside of Letters

The images below illustrate just a few of the intra-letter spacing elements that should be understood and considered when choosing which typeface to choose for your body text. In order for the white spaces inside of letters to remain visible in small sizes, it is necessary for their counterforms to have a certain minimum mass, proportionally.

Counters

The image above shows text set in two members of the ITC Bodoni family: ITC Bodoni Seventytwo and ITC Bodoni Six typefaces. In the first line, “Randglovesâ€� is set in a size mastered for 72pt display (ITC Bodoni Seventytwo), while “and jamâ€� is in the Caption size (ITC Bodoni Six). These words are reversed in the second line. Note how the enclosed white space in the top portion of the e changes between the display and text optical sizes.

Apertures

“Aperturesâ€� are the gateways that whitespaces use to move in and out of the counterforms of a typeface’s letter. The above image highlights the wide apertures in four letters from Erik Spiekermann’s FF Meta typeface. These allow for the typeface’s letterforms to feel more open. In certain sizes and settings, wide apertures—and the large counterforms that are their result—will make a text more readable.

The top line of the image above is set in Helvetica, and the bottom line in Frutiger. While the counterforms inside the letters of these two typefaces are similar in size, Helvetica’s apertures are much smaller. Because of this, white spaces inside of Helvetica’s letters and between Helvetica’s letters are much more closed off from each other than in a typeface with more open counters—like Frutiger.

Other counterforms and problematic letters worth remembering include the c; if the apertures of a, e, s are very open, the c should follow this same route. Then there are lowercase letters like a, e, g, s that often have rather complex shapes—specifically, they each feature several horizontal strokes inside a small amount of vertical space. How do their forms relate to one another? How large is the typeface’s x-height? Do the ascenders and descenders have enough room, particularly f and g? Do the counterforms inside of roundish letters (e.g., b, d, p, q, o) have the same optical size and color as those inside of straight-sided letters like, h, n, m, and u? How different from one another are the forms of the capital I, the lowercase i and l, and the figure 1? Can the 3 and the 8 be quickly differentiated from each other? How about the 5 and the 6?

5. Kerning

In the sample above, kerning has been deactivated for the second line. The gaps between the letters T y and V o are too large when compared with the amount of space between the other letters in the text. The typeface used in the image is Carter Sans.

Despite the popular misuse of the term in graphic design circles, “kerningâ€� does not refer to the spacing values to the left and right of the letters in a font. Rather, fonts contain a list of kerning pairs to improve the spacing between the most troubling lettering combinations. The importance of kerning in a font is the role it may play in maintaining an optimal rhythm. Just as kerning describes something much more specific than a typeface’s overall spacing—or the tracking that a graphic designer might apply to a text—kerning is not the rhythm of a typeface itself, but an element that may strengthen a typeface’s already existing rhythm. Not every typeface design requires kerning, and there are typefaces on the market that indeed may have too many kerning pairs—a sign that the basic letter spacing in the font could have been too faulty in the beginning.

6. Consistent Rhythm Along the Line

In the image above, compare the spaces between the letters of the Helvetica typeface (first row) with Frutiger’s (second row). Frutiger is a more humanist design, featuring a slight diagonal axis in its letters; many of them look similar to Helvetica’s, at least at face value. However, the space between Helvetica’s letters is much tighter.

While most of the images in this article feature typeface families that include Optical Size variants, many commonly used typefaces on the market today do not offer these options. This is why it is helpful to be able to identify text typefaces based on their features, rather than just on their names in the font menu. As mentioned earlier, it is primarily the typeface’s rhythm that dictates the readability of a block of text.

Take Frutiger and Helvetica, which are both commonly used in text, especially for corporate communication—Neue Helvetica is even the UI typeface in iOS and MacOS X 10.7. Yet, despite its popularity, Helvetica is not very effective as a text typeface; its rhythm is too tight. By rhythm, I’m not referring to tracking—or any other feature that a designer can employ when typesetting—but the natural flow of space between letters, and within them as well. Frutiger is a much more open typeface—the spaces between its letters are closer in size to the white spaces inside of the letters than in the case of Helvetica. Like all good text typefaces, Frutiger has an even rhythm—space weaves in and out of the letters easily.

7. Caveat: Signage Faces

To round off my discussion on text typefaces, I’d like to briefly mention some fonts that are often shown in rather large sizes: fonts for signage. Interestingly, many signage typefaces have design features very similar to typefaces created for very small applications. The Frutiger typeface, based on letters that Adrian Frutiger originally developed for the Roissy airport in Paris (now named after Charles De Gaulle), is quite legible in small sizes precisely because it is a good signage typeface. Despite their size, signage fonts serve a rather different purpose than Display fonts.

Additional Elements To Consider

After considering the criteria mentioned above, the next question that often comes up is, “does this font have oldstyle figures, or small caps and ligatures, etc.?� A font’s letters might look really great in text, but if they do not include additional elements and features, their use is somewhat minimized. I avoid using fonts with small character and feature sets where I can, because I feel that the lack of these “extras� may break the kind of rhythm I aim to achieve.

1. OpenType Features

Once you’ve established a consistent rhythm by setting your text according to the correct size and application, it would be a pity to inadvertently break that flow. Large blocks of tall figures or capital letter combinations do just that.

Even in languages like German, where capital letters appear at the start of many words, the majority of letters in a text planned for immersive reading will be lowercase letters. Every language has its own frequency concerning the ratio of “simpleâ€� lowercase letters like a c e m n o r s u v w x z to lowercase letters with ascenders or descenders—b d f g h j k l p q y. In international communication, language support is a key consideration when choosing a font, and other character set considerations may especially play a role.

Traditionally, the style of figures used in running text also have ascenders and descenders. These figures—often called oldstyle figures or text figures—harmonize better with text than the “uppercaseâ€� lining figures. These so-called lining figures either align with the height of a typeface’s capital letters, or are slightly shorter. It is no surprise that, when shipping the Georgia fonts for use onscreen and online, Matthew Carter and Microsoft made the figures take the oldstyle form. Many other typefaces that have long been popular with graphic designers, like FF Meta (seen above), also use oldstyle figures as the default style. In my opinion, lining figures are best relegated to text set in all-caps.

Long all-caps acronyms—like NAFTA, NATO, or USSR—also create an uncomfortable block in the line for the reader. Setting these letter-strings in small caps helps reestablish a specific typeface’s natural rhythm in reading sizes, as may be seen in the first line of the image below (set in Erik Spiekermann’s FF Meta).

Along with common ligatures like fi ff fl, small caps and the many figure options are the most common OpenType features found in quality text fonts. Aside from having both lining and oldstyle figures, OpenType-functionality can enable a font to include both tabular and proportionally-spaced figures, numerators and denominators for fractions, as well as superior and inferior figures for academic setting. Additional OpenType features (such as contextual alternates or discretionary ligatures), are more powerfully noticed in display sizes, and in some cases can even be distracting in text.

2. Hinting

The display of text on screen, particularly on computers running a version of the Windows operating system, may be fine-tuned and improved with the help of size-specific instructions inside of the font file. These instructions are commonly referred to as “hints.â€� A TrueType font (or a TrueType-flavored OpenType font), is capable of including hinting. However, not every font manufacturer goes to the effort of optimizing the onscreen appearance of its fonts for Windows—even those fonts specially created for use in text sizes.

All of the text in the above image is shown in the same font: Prensa, set at 18 pixels. The lowest row shows this at actual size in three different onscreen rendering environments. In the enlargements, the top row shows a close-up of rendering in Safari on MacOS X, which ignores the hinting data in fonts. The second row shows rendering in Internet Explorer/WindowsXP (Grayscale only, for this sample). The third row is from a ClearType environment—in this case, from Firefox on Windows7. Prensa is a typeface designed by Cyrus Highsmith at the Font Bureau; the Web font is served by the Webtype service.

Recommended Typefaces For Readability

Aside from the typefaces already mentioned in this article and its images, here is a small selection of faces that I personally enjoy at the moment. Even though lists of “favoriteâ€� typefaces are about as useful as lists of favorite songs or favorite colors, I am happy to pass my subjective recommendations along. No doubt that as new projects arise, my list of favorites is likely to change, too. I do think that these typefaces serve as great starting places. Some are also just from cool friends whose work I dig. Alongside each selection, I mention whether this choice is currently available for print only, or if there is a Web font version, as well. Don’t forget: the typefaces that you pick in the end should depend on your projects, their audience, and the content at hand.

Arnhem is a no-nonsense high-contrast oldstyle-serif face. It is a contemporary classic for newspaper and book setting, designed by Fred Smeijers and distributed via OurType. Available for print and Web.

Benton Sans is a Tobias Frere-Jones performance of Morris Fuller Benton’s News Gothic genre. Designed for Font Bureau, it is not only a great typeface for small print in newspapers, but one of the best-rendering text faces for the Web as well. Available for print and Web.

Ibis is another Font Bureau typeface, designed by Cyrus Highsmith. This square serif family is also no stranger to cross-media text-setting. Ibis works just as well whether you use it in print or on screen. Available for print and Web.

Ingeborg is modern serif family from the Viennese type and lettering powerhouse, the Typejockeys. Like any proper family should, Ingeborg has optically-sized variants for text and display settings. The display versions of the typeface can get pretty far out, too! Designer Michael Hochleitner named this typeface after his mother. Available for print and Web.

Fred Smeijer’s work in contempory type design is so significant that he gets two shout-outs in my list. His Ludwig type family takes a nod from 19th century grotesques, but he does not try to sanitize their quirky forms, as so many type designers had tried to do before him. Available for print and Web.

This is one of the typefaces that I’ve designed. I’m somewhat partial to Malabar. Available for print and Web.

Martin Majoor’s FF Scala Sans has been my top go-to typeface for almost 15 years. It mixes well with the serif FF Scala type, but it’s also really great on its own. Available for print and Web.

Of all the typefaces designed by Hermann Zapf over his long career, URW Grotesk is clearly the best. Unfortunately, it has been a little overlooked. URW Grotesk is a geometric sans, with a humanist twist that brings much more life into the letters than this genre usually allows for. Plus, the family is super big. Available for print and Web.

Are you a DIY-fan? Do you like to print with letter press, whether you set your own type by hand, or have polymer plates made? Then check out the typefaces of Emil Rudolf Weiß! His Weiß-Antiqua is an eternal classic. Weiß may have passed away 70 years ago, but his work is still relevant. He was German, so his last name is sort of pronounced like Vice, as in Miami Vice. Available for print and Web.

Conclusion

There are many factors that play a role in typeface selection. Aside from just browsing through the available fonts that they have, or fonts that could be newly licensed for a project, designers regularly spend considerable effort determining the right typeface to complement a project’s content, or the message at hand. Understanding some of the thoughts that go into the making of text typeface—including how a typeface’s letters are fitted to each other to determine a text’s default underlying rhythm—helps lead to better informed decisions regarding what types are indeed apt, and which faces are better suited for other sorts of jobs. After having read this article, I hope you feel more comfortable with this kind of decision making, and that you will know what to look for with a font in the future.

Other Resources

For more information about choosing the right text fonts, you may be interested in the following books and Web resources:

1. Websites

• Better Web Typography With OpenType Features
• Figuring Out Numerals
• Figuring Out Numerals — The Sequel
• The @Font-Face Rule And Useful Web Font Tricks
• The Making Of FF Tundra
• What Should I Look For In A UI Typeface?
• Making Geometric Type Work

2. Books

• Counterpunch: Making Typefaces In The Sixteenth Century, Designing Typefaces Now
• Size-Specific Adjustments To Type Designs
• Thinking With Type

Note: A big thank you to our fabulous Typography editor, Alexander Charchar, for preparing this article.

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© Dan Reynolds for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

Many dismiss copywriting as something that ad agency people do. Truthfully, all of us need to pay close attention to copywriting if we want to achieve our business objectives.

The goal of a “regular” text is to inform or entertain. The goal of Web copy (and ideally your website in general) is to get people to do something—to sign up, make a purchase, or something similar. Hiring a professional copywriter can be very expensive, which is one of the reasons why this is a valuable skill to have yourself.

“I don’t need to learn copywriting, I write based on how it sounds to me.”

Think you don’t need to learn copywriting?

David Ogilvy, the father of modern advertising, addressed this in his book Ogilvy on Advertising. One of his copywriters told him that he had not read any books about advertising; he preferred to rely on his own intuition.

Ogilvy asked him: “Suppose your gallbladder has to be removed this evening. Will you choose a surgeon who has read some books on anatomy and knows where the gallbladder, is or someone who relies on his own intuition?”

What distinguishes top experts from mediocre players is that the best know more. You can write better copy if you know more about it.

The Process Of Writing Great Copy

Everything is easier with the right process. If your approach to copywriting is “I’ll just try to be convincing”, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

You don’t even need to be a “natural writer” to come up with excellent copy, you just need the right process and some key principles about writing copy that sells.

The best processes are simple, as those are the ones you actually use.

Here are the six steps of effective copywriting process:

1. Research: customer, product and competition.
2. Outline and guideposts.
3. Draft copy.
4. Conversion boost.
5. Revise, rearrange.
6. Test.

And now let’s get to the details:

1. Research

This is often the most time-intensive part of your copywriting.

“You don’t stand a tinker’s chance of producing successful advertising unless you start doing your homework. I have always found this extremely tedious, but there is no way around it.”
— David Ogilvy

David Ogilvy had the task to do copywriting for a Rolls Royce ad. He spent three weeks reading about it before he came up with the headline and the rest of the copy. While he was talking about advertising, it equally applies to your website copy—the goal is to get people to do something.

Ogilvy’s famous Rolls Royce ad.

You need to figure out why people buy the product, how they buy it, what they use it for, and what really matters to them. If you don’t have this figured out, you really cannot write a copy that works. When it’s your own business that you’re writing copy for, things go much faster, of course, as you know the product and the competition.

Gauge the Competition

You need to be aware of your direct competition, how they present their product, and what claims they seem to be making. If you are not selling something unique, you are selling as much for your competition as you are selling for yourself. Being “like� others or choosing to be “one of the leading providers of� is a losing strategy.

Neuromarketing research tells us that differentiating our claims is the key to talking to the old brain, the decision making part of our brain. Our whole business identity should be different from the competition, and the claims we’re making about our product should stand out.

Get Out of the Office

The answers are not in your office and you won’t have eureka-moments at brainstorming meetings (working solo is far more effective anyway). You have to interview people. Don’t waste time interviewing random people, you need to talk to your ideal customers and find out what’s on their minds.

Find out what they think about your kind of product, what language they use when they talk about it, what attributes are important to them, and what promises would most likely convince them to buy it. Pick the last 10 to 20 customers (who still remember their purchasing experiences), and ask them these questions (recording the interviews is a good idea, but ask for permission):

• Who are you? What do you do? (customer profile)
• What does our product help you do? (helps you understand how they use it, tells you words they use to describe our product)
• Which parameters did you compare on different options? (which features matter)
• What were the most important ones? (key pains to solve)
• Which alternatives did you consider? (competitors we have to look at)
• What made you choose our product? (our key advantage)
• What were the biggest hesitations and doubts before the purchase? (things we have to address in the copy)
• Were there questions you needed answers to, but couldn’t find any? (necessary information to provide)
• What information would have helped you make the decision faster? (same as above)
• In which words would you recommend it to somebody you know? (words they use to describe our product)

Take note of the exact wording they use. Your copy needs to match the conversation in your customer’s mind. If you talk about “scribing devices” and he needs a pen, there’s a mismatch.

My point is that when customers see the product described in words they have in their mind already, then you’ve got their attention.

2. Outline And Guideposts

Next step: write the outline. Guideposts are the markers that help you write the content.

Writing an outline usually only takes a few minutes and provides a road map for the rest of the project. It allows you to complete the work faster and ensures that you stick to the flow.

The outline structure will depend on the page you’re writing the copy for. The main pages you need a well thought-out copy in place are your home page and product pages.

Here are outline templates I personally use, and you can copy them. I’ve tweaked and tested them over the years, and this model works the best for me.

Home Page Copy

Your home page copy structure depends a lot on your business. A nail salon would have a different approach from an e-commerce store; a website selling mobile app design courses is different from a hosting company. Hence, it’s basically impossible for me to give you an outline template for your home page.

What IS universal is the value proposition. Every home page needs one (unless you’re a very well-known brand)

A value proposition is a promise of value to be delivered. It’s the primary reason a prospect should buy from you. The value proposition is usually a block of text with a visual.

There is no one right way to go about it, but I suggest you start with the following formula:

• Headline:
  What is the end-benefit you’re offering, in one short sentence. Can mention the product and/or the customer. Attention grabber.
• Sub-headline or a two-to-three sentence paragraph:
  A specific explanation of what you do/offer, for whom, and why is it useful.
• Bullet points:
  List the key benefits or features.

Here’s a list of useful value proposition examples you can check out.

Product Page Copy Outline

Product page is where you sell the value of your product and where the user takes action (adds to cart, sign up, makes a purchase, etc.).

1. Name of the product.
2. Value proposition: what’s the end-benefit of this product and who is it for?
3. Specific and clear overview of what the product does and why is that good (features and benefits).
4. What’s the pain that it solves? Description of the problem.
5. List of everything in the product (e.g. curriculum of the course, list of every item in the package, etc.).
6. Technical information: parameters, what do you get and how does it work?
7. Objection handling. Make a list of all possible FUDs (fears, uncertainties, doubts) and address them.
8. Bonuses (what you get on top of the offer).
9. Money-back guarantee (+ return policy).
10. Price.
11. Call to action.
12. Expectation setting: what happens after you buy?

What you now have in place is like a skeleton. Next step would be to start writing the draft version of the copy by filling in the blanks.

3. Draft Copy

Start filling in the blanks in the template above, and keep these points in mind for the style of your writing.

Avoid Jargon and Blandvertising

The goal of the copy is to connect with the reader, and guide them towards an action.

“Human relationships are about communicating. Business jargon should be banished in favor of simple English. Simplicity is a sign of truth and a criterion of beauty. Complexity can be a way of hiding the truth.”
— Helena Rubinstein

Using complicated, fancy words does not make you seem any smarter or your solution any better—it just turns everybody off. Who wants to read something that doesn’t feel like it’s written for them? Talk to people like a real human. If you wouldn’t use a phrase on your website in a conversation with a customer, then don’t use it.

In addition to fancy words, avoid meaningless phrases. What do “on-demand marketing software”, “integrated solutions” or “flexible platform” really mean anyway?

Or useless phrases like “changing the way X is done”, “paradigm shifting …” or “exceeding customer expectations”—stop the nonsense. These bland phrases have long lost any meaning, and you will just waste precious attention time. You can see a list of the top 100 most overused buzzwords and marketing speak in press releases here.

Another thing to avoid—superlatives and hype. Saying things like “the best”, “world leader”, “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” will just ruin your integrity. People don’t believe such claims anyway (even if they’re true).

What to do instead? Be specific.

Be Specific

Specificity converts.

“Clearer and more specific subject lines convert better.”
— Bob Kemper, Senior Director of Sciences, MECLABS.

While in that specific quote Bob was focused on subject lines, this principle applies equally well to all copywriting. Specific is believable, specific is attractive, specific is convincing. Don’t be vague, be specific.

“We have the best coffee in the world” vs “Our estate earned the ‘world’s best coffee’ title at the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s Roasters Guild for the third year in a row.” Which claim is more believable?

You can use a superlative if you back it up.

Here’s an example. Can you understand what they offer?

Specific headline. Specific call to action with a specific explanation of what they get when they sign up. Specific benefits listed. Specific image to show the product in action.

It Has to Be About Them

Remember the old brain I mentioned before?

Our brains have three layers, and the oldest part—the old brain—is the decision-making part.

The “Old Brain” is the part that humans and their predecessors have had the longest—like 450 million years or so. So the part of the brain that controls decisions is fairly primitive and mostly concerned with survival.

If your copy is about you (your product, your company) and not the prospect (his problems, his life), you will fail. Make it about them. Too many companies start by stating “our company was founded…”, “we offer …” or something especially useless like “welcome to your website”.

Instead of saying “we specialize in dog training”, say “train your dog in two weeks”—move the focus from you to the benefit they will receive. People care about themselves—not you—and whether your website can be helpful in some way.

How Much Information Should I Provide?

Tests have shown that 79% of people don’t read, they just skim. However, 16% read everything.

Those 16% are your main target group, the most interested people. If people are not interested in what you are selling, it doesn’t matter how long or short your sales copy is. If they are interested, you should give them as much information as possible.

Complete information is the best sales copy. A study by IDC showed that 50% of the uncompleted purchases were due to lack of information. They can always skip parts and click the “buy� button once they have the information they need. But if they read through the whole thing and they’re still not convinced, then you have a problem.

This is why you should always strive to say everything that can possibly be said about your product. You cannot be there in person to explain and answer the questions, so your copy needs to do it for you.

All at Once or Make Them Click?

Long form copy works just great, but it’s not necessary to provide all the information on a single page. It’s okay to move supplemental information onto a different page (layer, popup, etc.) and just link to it.

For instance, Amazon often hides full technical information of products behind a link—since it’s only interesting to the hardcore tech savvy customers (and most customers are not).

Full technical details available after clicking a link.

The important thing is that all the information needed to make the decision is on a single page. Don’t make people work click to read stuff that you want them to read anyway (like features, benefits, testimonials, pricing, etc.).

When, Where and If at All Should I Show the Price?

Some people think that the price drives readers away, and they should hide it somehow—or make it hard to get to. While there is truth in that sometimes, it’s mostly false.

Consider this:

1. People always want to know how much things cost.
2. If you don’t publish the price, have a “get a quote” form instead. But if your competition does, they may get the client.

You should always make the price easy to find, but for more complex / expensive products communicate the value before the price.

Let’s say you’re selling a copper vase. Price: $990.

Seems expensive. But what if you knew that it was designed by Andy Warhol and previously used by Kurt Cobain? If you know who these people are and respect them, this changes everything, and it might seem like a steal instead.

So communicate value before price.

If your price is cheap, you want people to know it. If it’s expensive, the price qualifies the right people who are convinced to buy your copy. Giving price details also convinces your reader of the image and brand value of your product.

4. Conversion Boost

Once you have the content in place, it’s time to give it a conversion boost. The goal of the website copy is to convert the reader into a buyer (or subscriber, lead, etc.). There are certain things we can do to improve the conversion rate (the percentage of readers that take action) of the copy.

We’ll use three guides here to make the copy sell better:

• Conversion frameworks.
• Science of persuasion.
• Neuromarketing research.

Conversion boost. Image credit APM Alex.

Conversion Frameworks and Why They Matter

Conversion frameworks are a structured approach for increasing website conversion rates. The most prominent ones have been fine-tuned over the years and have been proven to boost sales.

While the conversion frameworks apply to a website as a whole, they can also be used as frameworks to improve sales copy.

There are many conversion frameworks around, let’s use one of them as an example:

C = 4m + 3v + 2(i-f) – 2a

This is not a lesson in physics, but a conversion formula developed by Marketing Experiments. Translation:

C = Probability of conversion
m = Motivation of user (when)
v = Clarity of the value proposition (why)
i = Incentive to take action
f = Friction elements of process
a = Anxiety about entering information

Summary: The probability of conversion depends on the match between the offer and visitor motivation + the clarity of the value proposition + (incentives to take action now—friction)—anxiety. The numbers next to each character signify the importance of them.

How to apply this to your copy:

• Is your value proposition easy to understand and perfectly clear? Would everyone understand what you offer and how it’s beneficial to them?
• Go through your copy and see if there’s any way to make your statements clearer.
• Communicate value: don’t just list features, turn them into benefits.
• Make a list of all possible questions, doubts and objections that prospects might have in the buying process. Address them.
• Make the buying or signup process as easy as possible, remove everything that is not absolutely necessary.
• Add microcopy: explain why you need certain data and what happens after they give it to you.
• Provide full information: what happens after they buy, what can they expect, when is the product shipped, what’s the delivery time.
• Add risk reversal: what kind of guarantees are in place? What happens if they don’t like it, or it’s not what they thought, etc?

The Science of Persuasion

Persuasion has been researched thoroughly. Mr. Cialdini is undoubtedly the biggest authority on the field. His books are bestsellers and have been on the “must-read� list for marketers and copywriters for years.

In his research, Cialdini came up with six scientific principles of persuasion that will help guide you to become more effective at getting people to do what you want. In case you’re not familiar with those principles, then here’s the summary:

Principle 1: Reciprocity
People feel obligated to give back to others who have given to them.
How to use it: teach your prospect something useful in your copy, give away free stuff, and better yet—add value to your prospects long before you even start to sell them something.

Principle 2: Liking
We prefer to say “yes� to those we know and like.
How to use it: talk/write like a human, connect with the reader, share details about yourself. Blog. Be friendly and cool (like Richard Branson, Oprah, Gary V).

Principle 3: Social Proof
People decide what’s appropriate for them to do in a situation by examining and following what others are doing.
How to use it: show how many others are already using your product. Show off your numbers. Use testimonials. Link to 3rd-party articles.

Principle 4: Authority
People rely on those with superior knowledge or perspective for guidance on how to respond AND what decisions to make.
How to use it: Demonstrate your expertise. Show off your resume and results. Get celebrity (in your niche) endorsements.

Principle 5: Consistency
Once we make a choice/take a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressure to behave consistently with that commitment.
How to use it: Start small and move up from there. Sell something small at first (a no-brainer deal), even if you make no money on it. They now see themselves as your customer, and will most likely return to make a larger purchase.

Principle 6: Scarcity
Opportunities appear more valuable when they are less available.
How to use it: Use time or quantity limited bonuses. Limit access to your product. Promote exclusivity.

What Neuromarketing Teaches Us

Research in neuromarketing (put together in this book) reveals interesting things about our brains.

Neuromarketing study in action. Image credit: SMI Eye Tracking.

We’re usually trying to talk to the “new brain”—the sophisticated one—but it’s the brute “old brain” that makes all the decisions, so we need to dumb it down. Here’s the formula for talking to the old brain:

Selling probability = Pain x Claim x Gain x (Old Brain)³

1. First you need to identify the prospect’s pain and make sure they acknowledge the pain before you start to sell them anything. Then, you’ve got to differentiate your claims from your competitors. The strongest claim is the one that eliminates the strongest pain.
2. Next, you have to show convincing proof to back the claims up. The “Old Brain” is resistant to new ideas and concepts, so your proof must be very convincing. Show tangible evidence, data, before & after comparisons, testimonials, and case studies.
3. In order to reach the old brain, you need to start with a “grabber”—something that really gets the attention (“if you’re selling fire extinguishers, start with fire”, like Ogilvy said). Second—the “Old brain” is visual, so use a big picture to illustrate and reinforce your message. Visuals get to the brain much faster than words. Best visuals show contrast—before/after, beginning/end, then/now.

How to apply it to your copy:

• Start with a grabber—something that evokes emotion.
• Address the pain from the get-go.
• Use a big picture next to your value proposition, one that the prospect can identify with.
• Are your claims different from the competition?
• Add proof to your claims in all possible formats.

5. Revise And Rearrange

Done with conversion boosting? Now enjoy a full night of sleep and come back to the copy in the morning.

A fresh look a day later will help you spot inconsistencies, missing information, and flaws in the general flow of the copy. Use this time to add more information, rearrange the order of different blocks and fix the typos (spelling mistakes can cost you customers).

Before you publish the sales copy, it always pays to get two or three other people to read it and give you feedback. You want feedback from your ideal customers—do they get any questions that were left unanswered? Is there any part that needs to be made clearer? And peers—other marketers or entrepreneurs. What could make the offer better and more credible?

Once the editing is complete, you can make it live on your website. Don’t guess whether the headline or value propositions are as good as they can be, immediately launch two versions of the copy and test them.

6. Test

There is no good way to predict how well the copy will do. Sometimes the conversion rates can skyrocket overnight. Sometimes the new copy turns out to be a downright dud.

You need to test your copy. Image credit Horia Varlan.

Maybe it’s because the offer is weak. Perhaps the headline is the bottleneck. It’s impossible to put the finger on the problem as all you have are hypothesis. The only way to know is to test.

Don’t trust a copywriter who says he always writes killer copy on his first try. Nobody does.

Most common problems:

• Your value proposition is poor.
• The offer doesn’t match the audience’s needs.
• The headline is weak.
• It’s not clear how the visitor benefits from this.

Start with A/B testing value propositions, and go from there.

Conclusion

Writing great copy is a skill you have to learn just like anything else. Use the outline and the tips to get started on the right track. Stephen King, the famous writer, said that if you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. I believe the same goes for writing great copy.

The best Web copy is not the one that uses sophisticated persuasion and mind manipulation techniques. The best copy provides full information about the product, its benefits, and makes it clear whether it’s the right one for the user.

(jvb) (il)

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© Peep Laja for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

Responsive design is the hottest topic in front-end Web development right now. It’s going to transform the Web into an all-singing, all-dancing, all-devices party, where we can access any information located anywhere in the world. But does responsive design translate well from the text-heavy Web design blogosphere to the cold hard reality of commercial systems?

Rumors came through our office grapevine that management was looking to revamp our mobile presence. There was talk of multiple apps being built externally that could be used on some of the major mobile devices. Our team had been getting familiar with responsive design and put forward a proposal of doing away with device-specific apps and developing a single responsive website that could be served to both desktop and mobile users. After a few hasty demos and prototypes, the idea was accepted and we began work.

The brief: make our current website, Airport-Hotels.uk, responsive while retaining the existing layout for users on browsers of 1000 pixels and up.

The following is what we picked up along the way.

Starting With Desktop Is OK

The general consensus now seems to be “mobile first.� I agree. Starting with a single(ish)-column mobile website is the easiest way to get your CSS off to a great start. However, we use an external design agency, so the time and cost of a new mobile-first design was not feasible. It was left to the front-end developer to translate the existing design onto screens of smaller dimensions.

The solution was to break up the website into smaller blocks (or nuggets), which could then be positioned differently as the browser’s width increased. This led to our first base media query, which contained the main branding elements, with minimal layout information. Because the nuggets were of a fairly fixed size, we had a foundation for creating a grid for each of our major media queries. Anything that wasn’t deemed to be a “nugget,� such as a larger block of text, would be responsive and fill in the gaps that the nuggets couldn’t.

While this method is not as good a practice as “mobile first,� it does have the advantage of being faster and cheaper than a full redesign. And you pick up great knowledge along the way for when resources do become available for something more substantial.

Less Is More

When getting your feet wet with media queries, you’re tempted to go all out, but do you need to? Theoretically, you could serve a completely different design to each device. While this would be spectacular and self-satisfying, maintaining it would be a nightmare. We ended up using the default media queries in Andy Clarke’s 320 and Up framework, containing four breakpoints (1382 pixels was not in the brief). Looking back now, we could have removed at least one of those queries, possibly two.

We’ve been gathering statistics in the weeks since the website’s release, and by far the majority of our customers are running browsers either of 320 × 480 pixels or on full desktops. We could hit over 85% of our user base by focusing on these resolutions, while cutting down on development time and maintenance.

This was especially evident on our availability page, which easily contains the most information of any of the pages in our booking flow. In the end, rather than try to serve the perfect design to each device width, we moved much of the CSS for the largest media query to the size below: less maintenance, less fuss, and more time to work on the UX (and, importantly to the business, to make bookings).

Ability Sniffing Is Not Enough

When I first saw tools like Modernizr, I thought they would change everything. I suppose they have, but don’t rely on them too much. Mobile browsers have more inconsistencies than any desktop I have ever seen. Even WebKit-based browsers can render things completely differently. With debugging tools at a minimum, it’s like we’ve been thrust back into the pre-developer toolbar era of IE bug fixing. Luckily, that’s one of my favorite things.

Exploring this strange new world of bugs became one of the major aspects of the project. A few of my favorites are highlighted below. Hopefully, they won’t trip you up.

CSS Columns

I love CSS columns. I had been wanting to use them for a while; but, other than small personal projects, nothing with appropriate content came up. While trying to work out the best layout for our website on a 320-pixel device, I realized that, rather than generating columns using floats or inline blocks, we could reduce the layout CSS to just a few lines by creating CSS columns. With most major mobile Web browsers being based on WebKit and Opera, this seemed to be a fairly reasonable solution and appeared to lay out everything perfectly. Great!

Here is the original code for the 320-pixel media query:

.product {
    -moz-column-count: 2;
    -moz-column-gap: 5px;
    -webkit-column-count: 2;
    -webkit-column-gap: 5px;
    column-count: 2;
    column-gap: 5px;
}

And here is the updated solution (roughly speaking — the actual code was much longer):

.product>div {
    width: 49%;
    float: left;
    margin: 0.5%;
}

Unfortunately, the column specification isn’t quite ready yet. On BlackBerrys and some HTC Android phones, our form elements (specifically, the buttons) became unclickable. The layout was perfect — we checked that the CSS was accepted with Modernizr, and all the links worked — and yet you couldn’t click the “Bookâ€� button. Back to the drawing board with that one.

We ended up using a more standard float-based column layout.

CSS Gradients

Gradients were another excellent instance of browser idiosyncrasies. We used a lot of CSS gradients in this redevelopment to replace some images. This should have saved the user’s bandwidth and made redesigns and maintenance faster.

On WebOS (with a WebKit-based browser), though, CSS gradients would render as completely black unless used on a form input element. It was baffling. In the end, we figured out that it was a bug in the implementation of -webkit-linear-gradient. We’ve learned that the bug has been fixed in the upcoming version, so this might not be an issue in the future.

Here is the offending CSS:

.ppcHeader {
    background: #73bff1; /* Old browsers */
    background: -moz-linear-gradient(left, #73bff1 0%, #009ff7 100%); /* FF3.6+ */
    background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, right top, color-stop(0%,#73bff1), color-stop(100%,#009ff7)); /* Chrome,Safari4+ */
    background: -webkit-linear-gradient(left, #73bff1 0%,#009ff7 100%); /* Chrome10+,Safari5.1+ */
    background: -o-linear-gradient(left, #73bff1 0%,#009ff7 100%); /* Opera11.10+ */
    background: -ms-linear-gradient(left, #73bff1 0%,#009ff7 100%); /* IE10+ */
    background: linear-gradient(left, #73bff1 0%,#009ff7 100%); /* W3C */
    margin-bottom: 20px;
}

(Bear in mind that CSS gradients add a heavy load to the browser’s rendering engine, so if you are using a lot of them, switching them off for mobile might be wise.)

JavaScript on BlackBerry 5.0 and Opera Mini

Basically, JavaScript does not work on Blackberry 5.0. BlackBerry tries, but it’s so inconsistent and buggy that it’s not worth it. We were reliably advised by Peter-Paul Kochs to just resort to device sniffing and to turn off any JavaScript. This is another reason to make sure your websites are progressively enhanced by falling back to non-JavaScript versions.

Meanwhile, Opera Mini works fine with JavaScript, but each of a website’s pages is rendered on Opera’s servers and then essentially compressed into a big image before being sent to the mobile device. This is great for the user because it can reduce bandwidth to 10% of the normal browsing experience. On the other hand, if you have onkeyup validation in your forms, this can be a problem because each call to the JavaScript would require refreshing the entire page from the server.

Forms Drop Users

This was and still is one of the major problems with mobile browsing on our e-commerce website. In order to make a purchase on an average website, the user has to fill in a lot of information: names, addresses, credit-card details, the list goes on and on. While typing on mobile has gotten much easier, navigating large forms is a frustrating and laborious process.

Our mockup payment page had 22 form inputs that needed some kind of interaction. These were required either to make a successful booking, to provide information to the product supplier after booking or for our own sales and data purposes.

The question became (as it always seems to be with mobile), what could we remove and what did we have to keep? Well, we tried to take the middle path, which is currently in development or might even be live by the time you read this.

We chose to split our payment process into two stages. Because our users can save more on their purchase by booking early, our first payment stage asks for the very minimum of information required in order to confirm a booking: name, car registration and credit-card details. This gives the user the best price available and chalks up another booking for us. Part two of the payment process is to gather the rest of the information required to “complete� the booking. This second stage can be filled out at the user’s convenience, either immediately or later on using our online booking management system. This eases any frustration caused by having to fill out a large form.

Good UI != Good UI

A good user interface means something completely different on mobile devices — and even tablets for that matter. Many of the user-friendly features we have implemented on our desktop website would just be bad ideas on these smaller mouse-less devices.

Lightboxes

Lightboxes were all the rage a few years ago. They were a convenient and pretty way to display a small amount of content or something that wasn’t worth loading a new page for. In IE 7 and up, you can position lightboxes using position: fixed, which is great. On mobile devices, though, browsers do not implement position: fixed, or they implement it in an odd way to prevent non-mobile-ready websites from not working at all. This will ruin any lightboxes.

We recommend just loading a new page for lightbox content: less JavaScript, easier and fast. A new tab would also be fine, but due to the infancy of tabbed browsing on mobile devices, maintaining the flow is probably a better idea for now.

Hovers

Content that is only visible via hovering obviously doesn’t work on touchscreens. What used to be an easy way to hide content while keeping it accessible has become a bit of a nightmare to deal with. We tried just removing the hover and showing the content, to see what would happen. The iPhone actually handles hovers fairly well, translating them into tap events. On Android, you need to click and hold for a little while to prevent the default action of clicking the link (our links are anchor-tag-based).

In the end, modifying the code that handles the hovers (assuming it’s JavaScript) and adding a tap event seemed to be the best solution. This allowed us to preserve the design’s aesthetic, while keeping as much functionality as possible for mobile users.

if( document.createTouch ) {
    this.addEvent(c[j],'tap',this.tipOver,false);
} else {
    this.addEvent(c[j],'mouseover',this.tipOver,false);
    this.addEvent(c[j],'mouseout',this.tipOut,false);
}

Date Picker

Our date-picker calendar was one of the biggest hurdles to overcome in the UI. We have a text input that allows the user to enter a date. Prior to the date-picker, our solution was a dynamically generated select box, but that caused confusion among many users because they might have remembered the day of the week they were flying on but not the date. So, we added the jQuery UI Datepicker to make filling in the search form one step easier.

However, what was one step forward for convenience on the desktop was one step back on mobile. Focusing the text input would open both the date picker and the phone’s keyboard, thus obscuring the date picker.

Our next option was to use the HTML5 date input. Because this element was released so recently, browsers are still playing catch up, and implementations vary wildly. It’s just as rough on desktop, with Firefox still rendering it as a text input, Chrome adds an up/down selector and forces the date format, while Opera actually renders a calendar just like the jQuery UI Datepicker. This solution still requires the date-picker JavaScript, but it forces the format, which can actually make it less user-friendly. While the concept is great and the solution will be great once the bugs are ironed out, we found that the date type input is not yet ready for commercial use in this fashion.

Our eventual solution (not yet live) was to use a JavaScript “touch event� query to generate a more mobile-friendly date picker than the standard jQuery UI one. This creates an iOS-styled triple drop-down menu for day, month and year and is user-friendly on mobile devices. The no-JavaScript backup can be either a text input or a select drop-down menu. Have a look at the code for yourself.

Fix IE First

The final point, which reflects the complexity of mobile development, is how to fit old versions of IE into this new technology. IE 8 and below ignores media queries, which presents a rather sticky problem when your entire website is based on them. There are several solutions to this, which we’ll explore below.

JavaScript Polyfills

I can think of two great JavaScript polyfill options for media queries. The first is Respond.js, which continually monitors the browser’s width, parses the CSS and then serves the correct styles for that width. This is a great solution if you need the website to respond on IE 8 and below. The main issue is the time between the document loading and the JavaScript kicking in; the website is initially displayed using the base style sheet, usually the mobile view, before it “jumps� to the full desktop version. Obviously, this doesn’t look great on a desktop monitor, and if the user is on an old browser, then their computer and Internet connection will probably be slow, too, which means that the jump time could be even longer.

The other JavaScript option here is the Chrome frame, which achieves the same end and has the same disadvantages. This solution isn’t bad, but just not right for our implementation.

Include All Media Queries

This is one of my favorite options for responsive websites and is also used in the latest version of the 320 and Up boilerplate. Create a separate CSS file for each device width; and for IE, serve them all to the user, with no media queries. With a mobile-first approach and a couple of fixed widths in your IE style sheet, this will serve the full-sized version of the website to users of outdated browsers. This solution is fast, simple and easy to maintain.

A Separate IE Style Sheet Entirely

Finally, given the right conditions, you could just write a completely separate IE style sheet, full of conditional comments to load the full desktop version of the website. Theoretically, this need only contain small amounts of layout information; but given that many of these styles will be reproduced in your media queries for wider widths, it can cause maintenance issues down the line. Duplicating code is never a good idea, which makes me wary of this solution.

Interestingly, we used this solution in the end, but with a twist. We used a PHP plugin in our template files to combine, compress and cache our CSS files. Due to some issues with the cache in IE, we were already generating a separate cached CSS file for IE users. We added a couple of lines to the PHP file to strip out media queries entirely as it combines and compresses the CSS. This method delivers the results of the “include all media queries� solution, while allowing the option for inline media queries in the style sheet. Because of the way we organized the CSS, this turned out to be the best solution for the project.

Conclusion

After all that, we finally have the first version of our responsive booking flow. I like to think that this epitomizes “mobile-ready.� We aren’t necessarily mobile-optimized, but our feet are on the bottom rung of a tall ladder that climbs to a great system that works perfectly on all devices. This is the starting point, if you will.

Was it worth it? It’s been a long journey, with a lot of head scratching and learning on our feet fast, but that’s what Web development is about, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. You can’t be perfect the first time round, and you don’t have to be. The point is that this technology is ready now, and the sooner you start using it, the better prepared you’ll be for the mobile market as it comes running at you. In the next few years, we’re hoping to see JavaScript network APIs that will allow Web users to add purchases directly to their monthly phone bill. I expect the mobile e-commerce market will explode at that point. Will you be ready?

(al) (da) (il)

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© Gavyn McKenzie for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

As all widely used web browsers (unless you still consider IE7 as being widely used) now support the :before and :after pseudo-elements along with the content property, using those pseduo-elements has become more and more common.

There are many clever CSS tricks they can be used for, like implementing a particular design without having to insert extra markup into your HTML. There is one catch though, and many developers seem unaware of this: several screen readers will speak content that is created this way. VoiceOver does (in both OS X and iOS). NVDA does when used with Firefox, though not with IE. I made a CSS generated content demo page so you can try it yourself.

Read full post

Posted in Accessibility, CSS.

Copyright © Roger Johansson

In this article, we take a break from some of the more advanced ways to customize WordPress, and share some super-easy customization techniques for the WordPress Admin area.

If you’re just getting started with WordPress, or have been running with default functionality for a while and now want to dig in with some useful and easy ways to customize your WordPress site, a great place to start is the WordPress Admin area, or backend. One of the great things about WordPress is that each part of the backend is easily customized using simple PHP functions.

In this article, you’ll learn how to customize the login page with your own logo, add new widgets to the dashboard, add custom content to the admin footer, make it easier to get in and out of the Admin area, and more. When combined, these techniques can improve branding, accessibility, and usability of your WordPress-powered site.

Changing the Default WordPress Login URL

By default, logging in to the WordPress Admin area requires either /wp-admin or /wp-login.php in the URL, which isn’t a lot to type. You can, however, make it even easier by changing the login URL to something more memorable and better branded.

This technique requires .htaccess file manipulation. Usually, this is a file hidden in the root of your WordPress installation. It’s automatically created by WordPress after setting custom permalinks using URL rewriting.

First, check your SFTP/FTP client preferences to show hidden files—most FTP clients manage that. Then, check that the file .htaccess exists. If that is not the case, create it by using your favorite notepad. On Windows, use the Notepad++ software to create it. Open it and add this line on top:

RewriteRule ^login$ http://YOUR_SITE.com/wp-login.php [NC,L]

Just replace the login keyword with one of your choice and your website’s URL.

Now, open your favorite browser and go to http://yoursite.com/login. You’ll be redirected to the WordPress login page. Remember that your clients are not supposed to know everything about WordPress usages—a user-friendly URL is far better to remember than /wp-login.php.

Easy to remember, easy to teach, easy to learn!

Changing the Default External Link of the WordPress Login Page

When you log into WordPress, the default logo links to WordPress.org. Let me show you a quick tip for using your own link. Open the functions.php file. Then, add the following lines of code. And be sure to remember the PHP tag enclosure.

// Use your own external URL logo link
function wpc_url_login(){
	return "http://wpchannel.com/"; // your URL here
}
add_filter('login_headerurl', 'wpc_url_login');

Don’t forget to save the file. Log out to view the result. Better, no?

Customizing the Login logo Without a Plugin

Reinforce your brand by changing the default WordPress login logo. The logo is one of the most important elements of your brand! People will memorize it to find you quickly. Showcase it!

This is the default WordPress login screen:

To enhance it, add these lines of code in your functions.php:

// Custom WordPress Login Logo
function login_css() {
	wp_enqueue_style( 'login_css', get_template_directory_uri() . '/css/login.css' );
}
add_action('login_head', 'login_css');

The third line points towards a separate stylesheet. Even though it’s possible to use that of your default CSS theme, I advise you to use Firebug—a useful Firefox add-on—or any other Web development tool that allows you to edit your website in real-time. As you can see, just one line of code is needed to change the default logo.

#login h1 a {
	background-image: url("http://YOUR-WEBSITE.com/wp-content/themes/YOUR_THEME/images/custom_logo.png") !important;
	}

Feel free to change the logo URL if it’s not located in your theme folder. Now have a look at your login page: your custom logo appears!

If that is not the case, make sure that no white lines are present at the end of your functions.php file.

Changing the Footer of Your WordPress Administration

The default WordPress administration footer thanks you for using their content management system and links to WordPress.org. For professional use and website branding, you’ll want to customize this area.

Open the Appearance menu and click on Editor. Click on functions.php on the right side of your screen. You can also access the footer by using an FTP client to locate /wp-content/themes/NAME_OF_YOUR_THEME/functions.php.

Now, add the following lines of code, taking care to place them between PHP tags:

// Custom WordPress Footer
function remove_footer_admin () {
	echo '© 2012 - WordPress Channel, Aurélien Denis';
}
add_filter('admin_footer_text', 'remove_footer_admin');

To customize the content, just change the second line inside the echo, between the quotes.

Finally, refresh your browser to see the result.

Adding Custom Widgets to Your Dashboard

It can be useful to add your own widget to provide general or commercial information. Adding a widget to the WordPress dashboard can be done very quickly. Again, open the functions.php file, then, add the following lines of code:

// Add a widget in WordPress Dashboard
function wpc_dashboard_widget_function() {
	// Entering the text between the quotes
	echo "<ul>
	<li>Release Date: March 2012</li>
	<li>Author: Aurelien Denis.</li>
	<li>Hosting provider: my own server</li>
	</ul>";
}
function wpc_add_dashboard_widgets() {
	wp_add_dashboard_widget('wp_dashboard_widget', 'Technical information', 'wpc_dashboard_widget_function');
}
add_action('wp_dashboard_setup', 'wpc_add_dashboard_widgets' );

In this example, add the desired text between the echo tag, after the quotes. You could also insert HTML; an unordered list for example. Name your widget—this will be the widget title—by replacing “Technical informations” with your title of choice. This is what it will look like.

If you do not see your custom widget, click on the Options menu screen located in the top right of the window to display it.

Hiding Unwanted WordPress Dashboard Widgets

The WordPress dashboard displays multiple widgets that you can easily move by dragging and dropping. To mask them definitively, just add the following lines in the functions.php file:

add_action('wp_dashboard_setup', 'wpc_dashboard_widgets');
function wpc_dashboard_widgets() {
	global $wp_meta_boxes;
	// Today widget
	unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_right_now']);
	// Last comments
	unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_recent_comments']);
	// Incoming links
	unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_incoming_links']);
	// Plugins
	unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_plugins']);
}

You can choose what widgets you’d like to hide. In this case, “Right Now”, “Recent comments”, “Incoming links” and “Plugins” have been removed from your WordPress dashboard. To learn more about this feature, have a look at the codex.

Creating Your Own Custom Admin Color Scheme

If you’re not totally satisfied with the WordPress admin color scheme, this is how you can customize it. All you need to do is create a new CSS stylesheet. In this example, we’ll call it admin.css and place it in a folder entitled/css. Once again, edit the functions.php file and add this snippet:

// Custom WordPress Admin Color Scheme
function admin_css() {
	wp_enqueue_style( 'admin_css', get_template_directory_uri() . '/css/admin.css' );
}
add_action('admin_print_styles', 'admin_css' );

Your admin.css file must contain styles that are compatible with WordPress. Again, I recommend you use Firebug or Web Inspector to identify the right ones.

Conclusion

That’s all folks! I hope you have learned a few good tips to make WordPress act more like a white label CMS. Remember that customization is not just a branding technique, but also a way to boosting your productivity, by increasing user-friendliness.

If you’re not comfortable with PHP, you can make most of these changes with the White Label CMS WordPress plugin. Do you know any other great tips? Share them with us!

(jc)

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© Aurélien Denis for Smashing Magazine, 2012.