My assistant, Kathy, was doing some upkeep on my websites and emailed me to let me know that the reading level on my sites is for an audience with at least a college education.

“The lower the score,” she reminded me, “the more understandable the content will be to your visitors.”

This is a great example of situations where knowing your target market and your website’s intended audience matters.

In my case, my markets and audience all have college degrees and most also have graduate education. So both of my sites, the one for my ADR clients (ConflictZen.com) and the one for my fellow mediators (this one, MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com), should have reading levels with the higher scores Kathy found.

Does your website’s copy match the reading level of your intended audience and target market(s)? You can find out if there’s a discrepancy by using the site Kathy recommends, Juicy Studio’s Readability Test.

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com.