Readability is one of the essential elements of a well designed website that, at times, can get lost in the graphical segment of the design phase. At least once a week I run across an affiliate site that has pages that are difficult, if not painful, to read or even scan. Undoubtedly, if you are presenting someone with a website that is not easy to read, your conversions will suffer.

Here’s an example I ran across today that show what I’m talking about:

As you can see, the gradient from grey to black makes the words on the page harder and harder to read the further right you go on the page…and the fine font doesn’t help that much either. In the end the site ends up looking amateurish…not the best impression to leave when you are trying to make money online.

Of course, it’s not just affiliate sites that suffer from readability issues. A great example of great content destroyed by poor text layout is the Cool Travel Guide blog. The blog is authored by Lara Dunston, a professional travel writer who has experience writing for some of the biggest travel book and newspaper publishers on the planet.

Being a professional writer, I would hope Lara’s publishers give her text better treatment than the headache inducing Blogger template she chose for her blog. To get a taste, here’s a shot of a recent posts: