Improve your blog: let readers change the font size

A very essential part of blog optimization is making it be a comfortable place for your old, faithful readers and even the new ones. I’m sure you agree with me that font size is a tricky part, on the internet, there are different opinions about how big or how small a font should be in order not to cause pain to the eyes.

I came across so many blogs and websites that had some really nice articles which could be a great read, but there was a major problem. The font size was too small for my eyes, so I couldn’t read anything. There were 2 possibilities: copy the text in a word processor and make the font bigger in order to read it without problems or just simply hit the x button and close the window. There are 99% chances that you would choose option number two (closing the window), and that’s exactly what I did. In other terms, this means money loss, high bounce rate, big decrease in the subscribers number, and more bad things for the one who tried to write a good article.

The best thing you can do is to install a plugin on your blog that will display a button on every article, a button that allows the reader to make the font smaller or bigger, according to his tastes. Luckily, if you are on wordpress, a smart coder made a very nice plugin called “WP-chgFontSize” which can be downloaded from here. Once the plugin was download, here are the installation steps, according to the author:

2. Decompress and upload the contents of the archive into /wp-content/plugins/.
3. Activate the plugin on your WP Admin > Plugins page by clicking ‘Activate’ at the end of the ‘WP-chgFontSize’ row.
4. Configure the plugin on your WP Admin > Options > Font Size page.
5. To use it, there are two possibilities:
* If your theme supports widgets, and you have installed the [widget plugin](http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/widgets/) or you are using Wordpress 2.2 or higher, add the ‘WP-chgFontSize’ widget on your WP Admin > Presentation > Widgets page.
* Add `<?php chgfontsize_display_options(); ?>` at the place in the theme’s file where you want the font size selection appear.

Regarding step 5, I personally chose the second option and it looks like this (click on the photo to make it bigger):

text-size-plugin.png

Again, I really recommend you to use this plugin which will definitely make happy some of your readers. If any problem occurs during installation, feel free to add a comment here telling what the problem seems to be and I’ll be glad to help.

Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • E-mail this story to a friend!
  • StumbleUpon
  • bodytext
  • Reddit
  • Sphinn
  • del.icio.us
  • Mixx
  • Google
  • Technorati

If you enjoyed this post, then you might consider subscribing to the feed via RSS or E-mail

Author:
Alex
Category:
Blogging
5Comments

5 Responses to “Improve your blog: let readers change the font size”


  1. Wayne John

    This is a great idea, and I have been trying to figure out how to best accomplish this on my BlogEngine install.

    I would recommend that all blog owners consider this since there are many elder bloggers out there that want the info, but may not be able to read (or will become too frustrated with) smaller text.


  2. p.kathiravan

    Configure the plugin on your WP Admin > Options > Font Size page. pls am in need of details abt this point


  3. Bamboo Forest

    This is a really good idea.

    Who knows - this plugin may be standard at some point for bloggers.


  4. Alex

    @p.kathiravan - These are the options I use for FontSize. Let me know if there’s still a problem.

    font-size-options.png

    Click on the photo for making it big.


  5. Ray

    I really liked the way they came off

Leave a Reply

ss_blog_claim=70fd68bfb00f3e70f4168d16b2016768 ss_blog_claim=70fd68bfb00f3e70f4168d16b2016768