Numerous studies have shown that web surfers have extremely short attention spans. Knowing that there is generally a huge wealth of alternative sites to look at, visitors are only to happy to hit the back button if they are not grabbed by a website straight away.

Reading level refers to the ‘readability’ of a document. The word readability refers to how easy the document is to read, and this is affected by the length of sentences, choice of words, grammar and other areas. These attributes can be calculated by an algorithm called the Flesch Kincaid score. The higher the score, the higher the level of reading skill required to comprehend the document effectively. As visitors may be put off by less accessible text, a higher score may reduce conversions on your site, as they leave before performing your desired actions. It has also been reported by many in the SEO community that a hard to read text could actually lower your rankings in some cases, so this could even lead to less visits to your page in the first place.

Google simplifies the Flesch Kincaid score into ratings of ‘Basic’, ‘Intermediate’ or ‘Advanced’ if you choose to activate this feature in ‘Advanced Search’. If you want to ensure that your pages are accessible to visitors, find your site having selected ‘annotate results by reading level’ in Advanced Search. The readability desired may vary from site to site. If your information is of a highly technical nature, an Advanced level may be appropriate and Basic may not convey the information adequately and could even be patronising. However, an e-commerce site geared towards a general public audience may be too exclusive if it has an Advanced rating and would require an overhaul to the text to simplify the vocabulary and sentence structure to make it welcoming for more people.

Having previously published entries via ftp, we decided to move to WordPress following the decision by Google to discontinue support for publishing blogs to client sites in this manner.

The system was resource intensive for Google, so it was stopped when the company was going through some other technical restructuring.

There are numerous benefits to using WordPress for blogging, as well as for a CMS solution when making entire websites. It is search engine friendly in many ways and this can be further enhanced through the numerous SEO plugins available.

Customisation of look and functionality is quite quick and easy, even for novices.