How Good is your Website Content?

[Nick]

How Good is your Website? Most business websites are unreadable - well, not without taking time, pausing, re-reading, concentrating and thinking about the material. The best way to measure the complexity of written text is by reading age - the lower the reading age the better the writing! Popular websites and blogs have lower reading ages. The BBC News website, for instance, is understandable by 11-year-olds. The world's most read blog, The Huffington Post, is readable by 7-year-olds. However, you've got be 15 or older to understand travel advice from the Foreign Office!

Here is a tool to analyse a website's reading age - what are your results?

Everything that I checked on my site came out as:

This page has an average grade level of about 7.
It should be easily understood by 12 to 13 year olds.

Not too bad, but room for improvement.

[Lynda]

Hmmm these days many adults do not have the intelligence of 12 - 13 year olds.

[Don]

This page has an average grade level of about 5.

It should be easily understood by 10 to 11 year olds.

[Nick]

My daughter, who teaches English, tells me that Word does this evaluation too.