If you want people to read the text on your website word for word, size does matter. But not in the way you might expect.
Testing has shown that smaller type — typically 12 or 13 pixels or 1.0-1.3em for regular text — actually encourages people to read the individual words because the smaller text requires more focused behavior.
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You’ve likely seen the famous eye-tracking studies showing how visitors tend to read web pages in an “F” pattern. Here’s something those studies don’t emphasize enough but is crucial when writing effective headlines: People don’t read across the entire line. They only really look at the left one-third of the headline. If the first words engage them, they’ll read more. Otherwise they’ll keep scanning down the page.
This is true even for the main headline at the top of the page. When you look at the heat map graphs (which is an aggregate view of all the eye fixations on the page where red means lots of views and blue means few), you can see that visitors do tend to scan in an F pattern, but the horizontal line is not a solid color. It starts to turn yellow about 1/3 of the way across before it ends in blue.
The same goes for any summaries or blurbs under the headlines. The research shows that the blurbs should not only be kept short, but the first of couple of words need to grab the visitor’s attention if you want someone to read your entire thought.
And the scanning quickens as visitors scan down the page.
So if you want your headline and summary text to be read, you have to put information-carrying or action words right at the beginning. Because by this point, very few people read this far into a line or sentence.
With one step you can increase readership of your headlines. Here’s how: Stop capitalizing every important word in your title. The publishing industry refers to this as the “Up” style, and its use is popular among traditional publishers, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
However, research has shown that capitalization actually reduces reading comprehension because it slows down the eye movement and requires the reader take more effort to extract the information.
Readers in general are used to comprehending sentences with natural capitalization – and punctuation for that matter.
The initial caps styling, along with underlining and double spacing after a period, is a relic of bad typewriter design, monospaced typefaces, and limited printing options.
In days of yore, initial caps or even all caps were used to distinguish headlines from the rest of the copy. This is no longer necessary with the advent of bold, italics, and varying font sizes.
So follow the lead of the Associated Press. Ditch the cap-every-word approach. And capitalize only the first word and proper nouns in the headline.
And be sure to end your headline with proper punctuation.
Summary: This should be the year you stop spending money interrupting strangers in their homes, cars, and walks down the street with messages they largely ignore. Instead, to grow your sales in 2011 – while saving money – you should focus on creating compelling, information-rich content that naturally attracts buyers; builds relationships with them; converts them into customers; keeps them happy; and encourages them to tell others. Here’s how:
Today’s secret comes courtesy of Adidas and NBA high-flying superstar Dwight Howard. 
AdAge Digital reports, the #2 shoe marketer encourages viewers to share a specific video, featuring Howard, that will gradually unlock to reveal more content of the player the more times it’s shared.
What a great idea. And it reveals an insightful strategy you should follow to promote word of mouth: The more someone shares, the more he or she gets. Rewarding your sharers is certainly not a new strategy, but this execution is pretty ingenious.
You’ll be able to find the video at youtube.com/AdidasBasketball.com
Parenthetical thought: When did Adidas pick up such great stars? In addition to Howard, it has KG, Tim Duncan, Derrick Rose, and a handful of other stars I’m sure my son knows and loves… I of course think MJ, Magic, Barkley, Bird, and David Robinson are still playing. Aren’t they?
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