Text Alignment Practices Every Developer Needs To Follow

Your website’s success depends not just on its page load speed and the quality of its content, but also on its overall aesthetic. How the website looks to the site visitor and how accessible and understandable this aesthetic is, determines whether people will continue to browse your website or not.

One of the most crucial aspects of website design and aesthetics, which make a person either love your site or hate it, is the text alignment. A poorly aligned and badly formatted text can be quite jarring to the eyes. No one likes to stick around looking at the text which is not easy on the eyes.

In this article, our team at Thrust will take you through common text alignment practices every developer needs to implement, to make sure the site they build is excellent and usable. So, let’s get started

Skip center alignment for really long text

When your site contains a lot of copy or blog content, you don’t want to use center alignment for everything. It can get quite monotonous for the readers and people may miss reading something important. To keep people engaged, it's important to divide the text into chunks and use different alignments, including left and right. By mixing alignment options, you ensure they don’t feel bored when reading your text.

Secondly, center alignment forces people to keep moving their eyes from left to right and back to left again, as they read the entire text. This happens constantly, resulting in eye fatigue. By placing certain portions of the text-only on the left or only on the right, you ensure readers don’t experience too much effort and fatigue when perusing your website.

Keep the language script in mind when choosing alignment

The best practice for developers aligning text is to mimic how the script is written on paper. So, for content that is written in languages that are conventionally written left to right (e.g., English, Hindi, French, etc.), use left alignment. Similarly, for content that is written in languages that are conventionally written right to left (Persian, Hebrew, Arabic), use right alignment. This makes it very convenient for readers and ensures they understand what is written on your website.

Always center align or hang align headers, tag lines, quotes and other small text boxes

Headers, brand tag lines, quotes from other people, and any other small text boxes that contain key information, should be center aligned, to attract maximum attention. Central alignment indicates the high level of importance of that piece of text, while also separating it from the rest of the body, which may be aligned right or left.

You can also use hanging alignment for these types of texts. The hanging alignment and indentation can be used in the place of center alignment to differentiate between levels of importance in headers and tag lines.

So, your most important heading, quote or tag line can be center aligned. But subsequent text boxes that aren’t part of the body, can be used with hanging alignment.

Use right alignment for numerical data

Let’s face it. Right alignment looks weird in a sea of left-aligned content. But right alignment can be a great way to drag the reader’s attention to really important things.

Aligning a portion of your text to the right may not look great in the overall website alignment aesthetic. But you can align numerical values to the right to make sure people’s attention falls on them.

Right aligning numerical values can allow you to create a table-like format, without inserting an actual table on the webpage. It can make both text and related numbers appear really put together.

Avoid justified alignment altogether

If you’ve printed out a piece of paper that has had justified aligned text, you may have thought about how good it looks. In fact, apart from paper, justified aligned text also looks great on mobile screens. But websites are also used on tablets, laptops, and desktops. The larger the screen, the weirder justified alignment looks because of the massive amounts of white space between words and near the edges.

Especially without any images to fill in these empty spaces, your website will just look empty. Without any information. And even if you have got rich data and insights on there, the alignment will make your website appear “less knowledgeable”. You certainly don’t want this, because you could risk losing sales.

Choose image alignment based on the theme and message of your website

Aligning images is as important as aligning text. This is because your images affect how your text appears overall. It also makes your site more aesthetically pleasing and readable.

When aligning images, consider the theme and tone of your web page and site. If you’re developing a medical site and the page is for cancer treatment, you’d want to retain either left-only or right-only alignment for your images. This is because there’s a formality, consistency, and somberness to the site. Images in a consistent alignment complement this theme.

But let’s say you’re building a website for an event management company. Such a website can use mixed alignment for your images, such as alternative left and right-aligned images, with small chunks of copy next to them. This type of mixed alignment looks more visually engaging and upbeat, in line with the theme and tone of the website.