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Easy Furniture Web Tip 196: The Problem with Headlines and Responsive Design

Furniture World News Desk on 8/19/2014


By Katherine Andes

In a prior tip, I discussed the value of having web sites with responsive design. With responsive design, your website reassembles the content to look good on mobile devices.

However, as a writer, I’ve discovered a problem.

Responsive design can mess up your carefully crafted headlines. Especially on smart phones.

For example, you might write:

Shop from our contemporary furniture collection. Stylish. Clean lines. Easy-to-care fabrics.

Because the sentence is long, you may wish to break up the lines. It’s simple enough to do. To keep the lines together, put a shift+return command after “collection.” and the rest of the text flows to a second line.

Shop from our contemporary furniture collection.
Stylish. Clean lines. Easy-to-care fabrics.

Now you’ve made a pretty headline.

However, because of that shift+return command, the sentence might look like this on a smart phone …

Shop from our contemporary furniture
collection.
Stylish. Clean lines. Easy-to-care
fabrics.

Not such a pretty headline.

At this time, I don’t have any solutions that are fully satisfactory.

For now, I recommend …
  • Write short pithy headlines. 
  • Write long headlines with no breaks.
  • Write the headline with the pretty breaks for the website, and hang the way it looks on a smart phone.
Note that the first solution — write short headlines — poses a problem for the web commercial writer. With commercial writing, the headline often has many tasks. Ideally, it should …
  • Grab attention
  • Contain a unique selling proposition
  • Contain a customer benefit
  • Contain relevant keywords
That’s a tall order for a brief headline. Depending on the content of your page, you might be better off with the other two solutions.

For now, do the best you can and …

Easy Furniture Web Tip 196: Check out how your headlines render on a smart phone and mobile device. Then adjust accordingly.

Katherine Andes specializes in web content development and copywriting for SEO — including page customization for storefront and franchise web sites. Visit her website BetterWebSales.com or phone her at 559.589.0379.
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