Websites that make their customers work to read them are not the best way to get business. Miniscule fonts, text in colors that make it hard to see against the background color, and lines that are piled on top of each other are problems, but they're easy to correct. Let's take a look at five easy fixes:

1. Format your text/fonts using CSS. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are the standard now - use one style sheet and control how text looks on your entire site. Make a change to the style sheet and your whole site is updated. It makes updating your website a lot easier.

2. Make the font size big enough to read. Consider your audience. Even if they are a group of teenage boys looking for new motorbikes, it's never a good idea to use really small fonts. It doesn't have to be huge, but up to a point, larger type is better. 12-pt Verdana is better than 8-pt Verdana.

3. Make the text contrast with its background. The more contrast, the better especially for people with a disability. Black-on-white or white-on-black are examples of the highest contrast you can get. Use colors if you like, but if you squint at the page and your text basically vanishes, there's not enough contrast.

4. Give the lines room to breathe. Try not to stack lines on top of each other. If people struggle to read it they will just give up. Use the line-spacing directive in CSS and give it some padding; I'll often set line-spacing to 140% of the height of a typical line.

5. Break text up into chunks. No matter how good a writer you are, people don't want to read endless pages of text. Break it up by using headlines that reflect the subject of the paragraph(s) to follow so people can scan down to the parts that really interest them, or use bulleted lists to change the pace of the writing and slow down the scanning.

And finally (not one of the 5 Easy Ways to Improve Legibility but still quite important) check your spelling. While on the surface it may seem like a minimal issue it simply makes you look like you don't care enough to get it right. Use that ubiquitous spellcheck tool wherever you can.

Making your website's content more legible is easy. It doesn't take a lot of time, mainly common sense. The payoff will be text that's more readable, customers that stick around long enough to get your message, and improved credibility with your visitors.