Why do Black and White images look awesome?

In the world of filters I had often wondered why do black and white images look so cool. You would find them on website front pages, birthday cards, magazines and what not.

But the mystery surrounding the human obsession about the binary colors seem unexplained at best. What is it in those colors that attracts us?

Why do pictures in black and white look more beautiful than their colored counterparts?

There are several reasons to begin with, Lets have a look at some of them.

Uncluttered,

Images in black and white are so uncluttered, clear and devoid of unnecessary distractions. The crux of the image or the main focus becomes painfully obvious when seen in black and white. In colored images the said crux is easy to mix. This phenomenon can be extrapolated to explain why paintings with minimal colors are often the ones valued extraordinarily.

See beyond,

Images in black and white are often used to help viewers see beyond the image itself. The patterns, textures and depth suddenly becomes obvious in a BW picture. Suddenly the curves, valleys and peaks become relevant and provide a new perspective to the image.

More Objectivity

We often attribute many of our emotions to the things we see around us. It is said that we subconsciously attribute our emotions to colors around us. For Example, red is often attributed to passions, green is attributed to envy, yellow with prosperity (or at least that is what we are led to believe in India). When looking at BW images, we are free of our individual biases and hence see the subject with much clarity.

Higher Visual interaction

Though partially correct, there is more to the explanation given above than that seems on surface. When seeing a B/W image, we see what we want to and not what the photographer wanted us to. This leads to a much higher visual interaction than the brain planned on having with the image. This is what interests it and the image suddenly looks a lot beautiful because now it means something. To illustrate the idea further, let us consider an image of a fruit basket, when you look at it, your mind will immediately start filling the requisite colors in the image and piece together information from your past experiences to make the picture look whole again, this will inevitably lead to higher brain functioning than expected and thereby lead to a piqued interest altogether.

Related Reading,

Using the concepts above, you too can create an awesome ebook cover,

Find which color would suit best for your website fonts.

Techniques to find the right color or hue.

And you can create your very own color palette.

This was an answer to,

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Relation Between Page Views and Syllables, A Comparison

How do syllables lead to difference in page views? Does the number of syllables in a passage actually make the reader's job difficult or easy? 

There aren't enough things that can be modified by a writer. But the short list would include definitely include syllables.

Syllable in the simplest of form can be called as a unit of tone itself. When you pronounce 'SOBER' you actually combine two different syllables, 'SO' and 'BER'. 

How does it matter you ask?

Many people when reading often voice the text, which means they do not simply ingest the text through their eyes, but also pronounce the words in their mind. Hence, the words employing large number of text might pose a problem.

This might seem true logically, but there is another reasonining that might put you in a difficult position. Lower number of syllables might lead to a rough and dull passage, giving rise to lower readership.

So what should you do, let us find out through an experiment.

The Experiment,

28 separate articles, published on codemakit.com at different times in 2014 were tested using a simple readability scanner. The text in each article was scanned to find out the average number of syllables per unit word.

We'll now discuss the role, syllables play in gathering page views, which would be found out by checking if increasing the number of syllables per unit word leads to higher or lower page views.

Relation between Syllables per word and page views

The provides a very different picture altogether about how the changes in syllables can lead to differences in the page views (pageviews)

TO understand it further, we need to compare it quantitatively.

Total number of articles compared = 28

Number of articles were number of syllables per word were proportional to page views = 11

Percentage of instances where number of sentences were proportional to page views = 11/28 = 40%

So, percentage of instances where Average number of syllables per word were proportional to page views = 17/28 = 60%

Thus the average number of syllables per word can be directly proportional to the page views. However, this must be seen in moderation and cannot be taken as a rule of thumb.

Conclusion,

Number of Syllables per unit word is directly proportional Page views.

Related Reading

To find more about the above topic, you can check out The Relation between Reading ease and Viewership through an experiment on Reading ease.
Do you want to know, how to calculate the readability of a passage?

You can also find simple relations like,
The relation between Page Views and Sentence Length,

This was about,

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Relation Between Page Views and Sentence Length, A Comparison

Can you read really long sentences? Can you digest a sentence containing 50 words? We have seen in a previous article that higher complexity leads to lower number of visitors. 

What happens when you use long sentences in a webpage? What is the optimum number of words a sentence must contain to ensure maximum user retention and interaction? Let us start with an example.

Sample A

Here is a really long sentence,

"The amount of visitors on a webpage is actually dependent on a number of factors which include the web owner's search engine optimization practices, his writing quality and his repo with the swarming visitors at his personal blog"

Let us analyze Sample A.

Sample A is a single sentence containing 38 words. A normal sentence that can be easily understood by a reader can range from 10-20 words. Usually a sentence with a large number of words and phrases taxes and stretches a reader's brain.

More often than not, a sentence with large number of words is avoided by readers. Also such sentences are absolutely abhorred by readers looking for a light reading.

The sample was excruciatingly long and might have prevented many of my readers to go and read sample B which further increased this page's bounce rates ##;

Sample B

Here is the short version of the above text,

"Number of visitors is proportional to SEO, content and visitor interactions"

Let us analyze Sample B.

Sample B contains 11 words which is easily digestible. The reader can easily deduce that page views depend on the 3 factors only. People looking for a light reading will not be disappointed by the text and might even look forward to reading more.

The Experiment,

Moving back to the experiment, 28 articles, published on codemakit.com in 2014 were tested using a readability scanner. This article would talk about the role, the number of sentences play in gathering page views.

We would check if increasing the number of sentences or number of words would lead to higher or lower page views.

Relation Between number of sentences or words and page views

The number of sentences and page views can be compared using the graph above. As is evident, sans a few irregularities, the numbers of sentences do correlate with the number of page views. TO delve into it further, it is required to understand the problem, quantitatively,

Total number of articles compared = 28

Number of articles were number of sentences were proportional to page views = 15

Percentage of instances where number of sentences were proportional to page views = 15/28 = 53%

Number of articles were number of words were proportional to page views = 13

Percentage of instances where number of words were directly proportional to page views = 13/28 = 39%

So, percentage of instances where number of words were inversely proportional to page views = 13/28 = 61%

Thus it can be clearly deduced from both sentences that the number of sentences/ words has nothing to do with respect to pages views and that a really long sentence is equally probable to receive thundering applause as a really short one.

So lowering the number of sentences / Words at your blog can be disastrous as Google's panda updates view them seriously and often impose large penalties on WebPages publishing pages after pages with a really small amount of content.

But simply considering the number of sentences as the defining parameter in a text can be disastrous.

Consider the case of a webpage which contains sentences of the length of Sample A. Evaluating such long sentences would ensure huge number of words but would undermine the fact that the number of sentences have reduced drastically. Hence we need another type of parameter that assesses both the number of words and the number of sentences.

Relation between average number of words per sentence and page views

Hence comparing the average number of words per sentence page views was required. Average number of words per sentence is actually equal to the ratio of number of words and number of sentences. It tells about the number of words per unit sentence.

Number of articles were number of sentences were proportional to page views = 15

Percentage of instances where number of sentences were proportional to page views = 11/28 = 61%

Thus the average number of words per unit sentence can be effectively said to be directly proportional to the page views. However, this must be seen in moderation and cannot be taken as a rule of thumb.

Conclusion,

Page Views are directly proportional to the number of words.

Page views are also directly proportional to the number of words per unit sentences.

Related Reading

Learn how to calculate the readability of your blog or website pages, you could also mechanically grade your essays too!

Codemakit performed a really nice experiment on the readability of the text by Nobel Prize Winners,

Did you know that there is a relationship between Page Views and the Ease of Reading.

This was about,

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How to calculate the readability of a passage

The engine at read-able.com performs its function flawlessly when you add some text to be analyzed. 

The following text is from an article on "4 crucial facts Google Analytics can tell about your readers". And the following are the results after assessing the piece of text.

As can be seen from the table itself, several parameters are calculated on the text. An explanation with the formula for each parameter can be found below.

Simple Textual Properties of the passage

Text Statistics	Value
No. of sentences	7
No. of words	163
No. of complex words	16
Percent of complex words	9.82%
Average words per sentence	23.29
Average syllables per word	1.45

No. of sentences

Simply counting the number of full stops along with an algorithm

No. of words

Simply counting the number of spaces along with an algorithm

No. of complex words

I have no Idea, what can be construed as a complex word and what cannot. In my opinion, there must be a threshold number of characters in a word, exceeding which; the word can be construed as a complex word.

Percent of complex words

It can be calculated with the ratio of number of complex words to the number of total words.

The following is a valid formula for the same,

Percentage of Complex Words = ( ( number of complex words / Total Number of Words ) x 100 )

Average words per sentence

It can be calculated simply by dividing the number of words with the number of sentences

Average Words Per sentence = ( Number of Words / Number of sentences )

Average syllables per word

Syllable is a single unit of a word, separated in accordance with its sound. If you type 'Gutter" you have two syllables "Gut" and "ter". So the word "Gutter" will have two syllables.

A valid formula for the same can be

Scores found through empirical Formulas

Readability Indices	Value
Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease	60.7
Flesch Kincaid Grade Level	10.6
Gunning Fog Score	13
SMOG Index	8.8
Coleman Liau Index	11.1
Automated Readability Index	11.7

Flesch–Kincaid Scores

Flesch–Kincaid readability test indicates the difficulty in understanding a text. They use word length and sentence length as parameters for their calculations.

The scale ranges from 0 to 100. Higher the score, easier is the text to read. If you receive a really low score, it means that the text is really complicated and hard to understand.

Flesch–Kincaid Score = 206.835 - 1.015 x (Words/sentences) - 84.6 x (Syllables/words)

Gunning Fog Score

Gunning Fog Index is simply the number of years of formal study; a typical US student would have undergone to understand the text written. So if you get a fog index of 11, it would mean that a typical US student of about 17 years would comprehend the subject completely.

The following is the formula for the same.

Fog Index = 0.4 x ( (Words/sentences) + 100 x (complex Words/Words) )

SMOG Grade

SMOG is a short form of Simple Measure of Gobbledygook. Just as Fog index measured the years of schooling required to interpret a piece of text for US based students, SMOG index can be applied anywhere.

The following is a formula for the same.

SMOG Index = 1.0430 x square root (30 x complex Words/sentences) + 3.1291

Coleman–Liau index

This index is also used to determine the difficulty of text. It uses only the number of letters per 100 words and the average number of sentences per 100 words.

The following is a formula for the same.

Coleman–Liau index = 0.0588(letters per 100 words) - 0.296(sentences per 100 words) - 15.8

Automated Readability Index

It takes in parameters as average characters per unit word and the average number of words per unit sentences.

Automated Readability Index = 4.71 (Characters/Words) + 0.5(Words/Sentences) - 2.43

Related Reading,

Here's a codemakit research article on the relation between readability and viewership.

This was about,

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A Dialogue with Allie from Grammarly

English Grammar is a vexing concept that comes into use at every turn in your digital life. It is here, you often encounter Grammar Nazis who would tear you limb to limb if you're found with a wrong grammar construct or a misspelled word. 

You just cannot afford the time and energy to check every comment and every blabber by copying and pasting it into Microsoft word, just to check for mistakes. It simply seems too much work.

Introducing Grammarly, a service that can correct you anywhere, from typing in the hostile depths of social networks chained within 140 words, or replying to a racist comment at Facebook to mailing your boss about why you didn't submit the report.

We have with us Allison VanNest, Director of Public Relations at Grammarly. She seems petrifying, but trust me, Allie is a really bright and considerate professional who agreed to take time out of her busy schedule to let us trouble her with our questions.

Let me start with Grammarly first. It is a really efficient service that helps you write correct grammar in your everyday communications. The service works on several platforms and instantly points you towards an incorrect grammar construct or a misspelled word. You can then use it to provide correct alternatives to your incorrect sentence.

Grammarly is renowned worldwide as the best grammar checker there is. It was founded in 2009 by two entrepreneurs. Brad Hoover the CEO holds the reins of the san fransico based web service giant. The service can chekc more than 250 different types of grammatical errors that users often  make. The website boasts more than 3 million users as of 2015 and has an alexa rank of less than 4000.

Grammarly has performed consistently well at its job and hence, won too many awards and accolades to even mention here. However in august 2013, Grammarly was ranked number 344 on Inc. magazine’s 32nd annual Inc. 500 list, an exclusive ranking of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies. It was also the finalist in the “Best Bootstrapped Startup” category in the 8th Annual Crunchies Awards in Feb 2015.

Introduction

Mohit: Tell us about the story of Grammarly, How did the idea take flight?

Allie: Grammar rules can be confusing, and they are constantly evolving. Grammarly was founded in 2008 by Alex Shevchenko and Max Lytvyn, both English language learners, to instantly and accurately provide written writing assistance to the more than two billion native and non-native English language speakers worldwide. The automated proofreading tool provides an easy way for students, professionals, job seekers, and English language learners to become more accurate English language writers.

About the Team

Mohit: Online service based companies are often depicted as geeky heaven with chocolate fountains, free food to sleeping pods. How is the work environment and culture at the offices of Grammarly?

Allie: At Grammarly, we codified our culture profile with one word -- EAGER. The goal is to have a memorable, understandable, and actionable company culture. While EAGER describes the attitude of Grammarly's team members, it’s also an acronym:

Ethical: Be honorable to earn trust. Do the right thing, even when no one is watching, without exception.

Adaptable: Embrace change, and learn in order to evolve and succeed. Apply a positive, problem-solving attitude.

Gritty: Demonstrate passion and perseverance for long-term goals, since persistence drives achievement. Do whatever it takes to get the job done, whenever it is necessary.

Empathetic: Treat others as you want to be treated, so we can work well together. Actively listen and put yourself in others’ shoes, and then respond accordingly.

Remarkable: Be recognized as exceptional yet humble, because talent drives impact. Seek out those who are exceptional and learn from them.

Although we have remarkable benefits at Grammarly – yoga, catered lunch, and more – we feel like the most important aspect of our work environment and culture is each other.

Tackling Competitors

Mohit: I'm sure you're aware that some websites have performed tests on Grammarly to check its accuracy. Some have found promising results (like me) but some (mostly rivals) have not. What is your opinion of such usage tests performed by individuals and rival firms on Grammarly?

Allie: We’re pleased you’ve found our product promising. The fact is that Grammarly’s ever-evolving algorithms work to accurately catch English spelling and grammar mistakes based on deviations from baseline grammar standards. For each potential issue flagged by Grammarly’s algorithms, users receive a detailed explanation so they can make an informed decision about how, and whether, to correct the mistake. While Grammarly’s algorithms are very powerful and constantly improving, they are not a replacement for a teacher or proofreader. Grammarly is an automated, cost-effective, and always-available tool to improve users’ English writing and skills.

On Social Networks

Mohit: You have a thriving Facebook community, which provides a platform for grammar discussions. With more than 4.5 million fans at facebook and nearing 2 million at Google plus, describe the challenges faced by your social media team in increasing and maintaining fans.

Allie: We actually don’t emphasize growing our social media fan base. It has been a fun thing for the team to watch, but it was never a sign of our success. Instead, Grammarly emphasizes engagement rates and reach. This has been the greatest challenge—to test, optimize, and adjust to make both our fans happy and the social algorithms. We’re just getting to know our audiences and responding. It’s just a conversation. Sometimes we say something wrong, but it informs how we say things moving forward.

On Business

Mohit: Cloud-based processing is often an advantage when you have exceedingly large algorithms to process the users' input. But this system often takes a hit in countries with no reliable internet connection. How do you propose to solve this?

Allie: Interestingly, some people who do have reliable access to the Internet are not able to make use of certain cloud-based tools for monetary reasons. That’s the first problem that the Grammarly team is tackling. Grammarly believes that quality writing improves confidence and credibility, and we know that everyone should have access to these personal and professional tools, regardless of income. 

Through the launch of Grammarly’s Chrome extension, we’re now offering our quality spelling- and grammar-checking tool for free to users of Google Chrome. We hope to extend this functionality in 2015 to other browsers so that any writer with a reliable Internet connection can improve their credibility and communication style.

Mohit: Note. For those without Chrome, Grammarly services can be accessed from various portals including the Grammarly Plug-in for Microsoft Office Software or Grammarly Words, a contextual online thesaurus or the Grammarly Editor at Grammarly.com

Here we conclude this interview. Allie, I would like to thank you for taking time out of your schedule to help us understand the nitty-gritty of a service-based business and introducing us to Grammarly, which quite simply is an exceptional piece of work.

Our readers can pitch questions to Allie through the comment section and I'll make sure the questions reach Allie.

Related Reading

You know we have our share of interviews with really successful entrepreneurs like the one we've discussed here. For example, you should read about one of my local we designers, i.e. Jetbro from The Den. Just like Alex and Max, we also have the geniuses at Degoo.com and at RescueTime who have developed a service of similar standards.

This was,

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An Experiment on the Ease of Reading Text

Though it is true that the real information about the quality of text can be collected by reading it, there exist better empirical ways to do that for you. To judge the text in accordance with such empirical methods require some raw data. 

For instance, the average number of words per unit sentence, the percentage of complex words in the text, and the average number of syllables per word.

To understand this even further, you would need to know what a syllable is. A syllable is basically a unit of sound in a word. Let us take an example; If you say the word 'maker', you are combining two syllables, 'ma' and 'ker'.

Now, the texts for this experiment were taken from various sources in different period of times.

The Study Participants

First we have Harold Pinter, Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005. The text was taken from his Noble Prize acceptance speech.

Second we have, Alison Munro, another noble laureate in the field of literature, who received the prize in 2013. Her style of writing is short stories and the text was taken from 'Passion' one of her popular short stories.

Third we have Amartya Sen, the Indian economist who received the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998. The text was taken from his book, 'The Idea of Justice'.

Lastly, we have Oliver E Williamson, who received the Sveriges Riksbank Prize In Economic Sciences in 2009. He wrote a book on Transaction-Cost Economics: The Governance of Contractual Relation, from which the text was taken.

The Study

Now that we have introduced the participants of the study, we need to understand the reason for their selection. For both literature and economic laureates the idea was to include two types of passage with the amount of time varying as between 10 to 15 years. Also, the participants were to belong to different countries. This idea however proved inefficient as the noble laureates in Literature from different countries than US and England tend to write in languages different than English. Hence finding a laureate with major works in English was exceptionally difficult.

Analysis of the Results

It is true, not all text excerpts were of the same size, which is partly because of the difference in media and mode of text found. Speeches in particular need to be taken as a whole instead of small excerpts (Full chapter) from a book. Similarly, short stories should also be considered as a whole instead of a part.

Name of The nobel Laureate(Award Details)	Harold Pinter (Nobel Prize in Literature 2005)	Alison Munro(Nobel Prize in Literature 2013)	Amartya Sen (The SverigesRiksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1998)	Oliver E. Williamson (TheSveriges Riksbank Prize In Economic Sciences In Memory Of Alfred Nobel 2009)
Source of Text	Nobel Lecture (Speech) December 7, 2005	Passion (Short Story), fromMarch 22, 2004 Issue of New Yorker	The Idea of Justice (Book), The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts.	Transaction-Cost Economics:The Governance Of Contractual Relation (Book), Oliver E. Williamson University Of Pennsylvania
Number of sentences	367	956	20	24
Number of words	4698	11460	636	527
Number of complex words	650	640	122	159
Percentage of complex words	13.84%	5.58%	19.18%	30.17%
Average words per sentence	12.8	11.99	31.8	21.96
Average syllables per word	1.53	1.3	1.64	1.94
Minimum age required to understand the text	13-14 Years	11-12 Years	21-22 Year	22-23 Years

As is evident, the percentage of complex words (methodology of counting which is still unknown) is considerably higher in the case of economists in comparison to the literature laureates. Similarly the average number of words per sentence too is about 3 times the ones used by laureates in literature.

Though the average syllables per word tends to increase as you use higher/ complex words, the average syllables per word for all four of our participants were comparable.

Hence According to the tests through read-able.com, the minimum age of any reader trying to read one of their typical texts range from 11 to 14 years for literature laureates. Hmm, their writings do not seem so tough to understand now. Also, the writings of economics laureates tend to fall within the range of 21 to 23 years.

Based on the raw data found in the previous table, one can determine these important indices to examine the text sample.

Advanced Tests

As per the results of Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease test, where a higher score means that the text is easier to read, you can see that due to the number of complex words, the score for economics Nobel laureates are considerably lower than their literature counterparts.

According to SMOG Index, Alison Munro's piece on passion depicted the use of simple words, thereby leading to better understanding of the text. The same can be correlated with the Coleman Liau Index with the highest for Oliver E. Williamson.

Parameter		Nobel Laureates
Name	Name of The nobel Laureate (Award Details)	Harold Pinter (Nobel Prize in Literature 2005)	Alison Munro (Nobel Prize in Literature 2013)	Amartya Sen (The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1998)	Oliver E. Williamson (The Sveriges Riksbank Prize In Economic Sciences In Memory Of Alfred Nobel 2009)
Source of Text	Type of Text, Date/ source	Nobel Lecture (Speech) December 7, 2005	Passion (Short Story), from March 22, 2004 Issue of New Yorker	The Idea of Justice (Book), The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts.	Transaction-Cost Economics: The Governance Of Contractual Relation (Book), Oliver E. Williamson University Of Pennsylvania
Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease	(A high score means the text is easier to read)	64.4	84.6	35.4	20.2
SMOG Index	Greater the Score, tougher the text	7.8	5	14.2	14.8
Coleman Liau Index	Shows the Grade of student required	10.8	8.1	13.4	17.8

Related Reading

You can check out our article on the relationship between reading ease and viewership here.

This was,

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Auto Grammar Check, Grammarly, A Review

Word Processing softwares like Microsoft word are simply awesome in correcting your essays, reports and business letters. But, not all mistakes are picked up by such softwares. Reason, they're not made for sentence corrections. They're made to help you type, change font sizes, colors etc. But checking grammatical compositions? I don’t think so.

During one such endeavor, I stumbled upon Grammarly. Really neat pieces of online software which can scan your text and help you modify it according to the correct grammatical rules. This article is a reality check for Grammarly and its services.

Let us check out Grammarly's features.

• Of course it has a grammar checker or a grammar correction engine which checks and advices modifications to your text.
• It also has a contextual spell checker which advices on the correct spelling of a word based on the context of the sentence.
• It also has a Grammarly Plug-in that adds similar features to your Microsoft word and Microsoft outlook software.

Signing-up is simple enough,

Adding it to chrome is easiest

The Test Results

Codemakit itself tried its hand on the perfection seeking online gizmo. So we uploaded a previous article from codemakit on "The dangers of Fair Use Copyright Policy". It is a common policy at codemakit that each and every article published on the website, goes through a series of checks to keep the quality of writing consistent with the highest standards possible. As a result, the text of each article is subjected to

1. The normal spell and grammatical check at Microsoft word,
2. Additional Checks at blogger platform
3. Proofreading of the complete document to ensure removal of contextual or logical errors that may have crept up.

The same article was abridged to remove unnecessary fringes and uploaded to Grammarly (After signing up at a fairly simple form).

Yes Errors were minimal, but they were still present. It came out as a surprise that Grammarly could point out 5 errors in the text uploaded even after it was subjected to such rigorous checks.



The errors were
2 Insertion of commas
1 Replacement of the word ‘of’ instead of ‘in’
2 Insertion of hyphens

Other Reviews

In the recent times, Grammarly has been under fire from various websites because of its non performance in pointing out errors in some easy statements (The economist was one of them). Grammarist.com conducted a test of its own for determining Grammarly's efficiency in pointing out errors in statements. 14 incorrect statements were typed in the Grammarly interface. Grammarly could find 4 errors but was unable to find anything wrong with the other 10. Since some time has passed since grammarist's test was conducted, Codemakit now repeated the same test with the same 14 sentences to check for updates in the engine. We found that now Grammarly could find 6 errors as opposed to the previous 4.

Final Verdict

The perfection loving Grammarly isn't perfect, but just as a human, it is improving with time. Though imperfect, it is still better than the spell check tool at Microsoft word. I would definitely recommend its use to students and businessmen alike.

Update

After writing the article, I was sending a mail to some bloke and grammarly came in swooping like an eagle, pointing out two mistakes at my mail's disclaimer.
Oh this reminds me, I have to edit the disclaimer.

Related Reading,

A previous post on organization of articles will help shed some light on the workings of codemakit aside from simple grammar check.

If you found the example text interesting, you'll be pleased to note that, we have another one like it, i.e. a case study on the dangers of fair use copyright policy.

This was on,

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The Relation between Reading ease and Viewership

Ever wondered, how your writing style affects the number of visitors at your blog? 

We often wonder what do people mean when they say, quality trumps quantity. Or when people say, "You need to focus on your content to leverage your SEO practices".

Who knows what type of content qualifies as quality content? So we at codemakit, performed an experiment to find out "How does page views relate to the readability of a text?". 

The Premise

A complete set of all articles published at codemakit.com was collected for the year 2014. Every article written in 2014 was passed through a readability scanner and values for the above mentioned parameters were found. The page-view data for each article was obtained from blogger's stats page. Finally each article was compared on the basis of the specific parameter and the number of page views garnered by the article during that period.

It might be possible that some articles discussed in the experiment were too recent to be able to check for absolute page views i.e. the recent articles might have lesser page views and still be attracting visitors while the older articles might have a large number of page views and have stopped gather more due to lack of updation. However through subsequent tests, it was found that a normal article stops gathering substantial page views after a period of a month. Any page views after a month of publication is quite small and can be neglected in the study.

The Results

The readability of any text can be determined very easily. You just need to consider some parameters and find the relation between them and the number of page views received by your blog.

Further articles will delve into different relations between the following parameters,

Changes in Page-views with number of words

Changes in Page-views with number of sentences in an article

Changes in Page-views with number of syllables per word in a passage

Changes in Page-views with average number of words per sentence

Changes in Page-views with the number of Complex Words in a text

Changes in page views with percentage of complex words in an article

Such simple and elementary comparisons between the parameters will help us understand what type of writing does a normal user and a normal search engine like.

Related Reading,

Just like the articles above, we have an answer to another question, Do pages with questions as title receive more clicks? You can check out the simple version of article on titles as questions too.

We also have similar article sets which talk about higher blog visitors with a focus on everything by content.

If you're unsure about what content would suit your blog, you can check a dumbed-down version of everything that Google considers superior.

This was,

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Optimum Number of Images for a Webpage

Text has been the pioneer in information dissemination. But the ball has now left the court. In the digital age of high speed broadband internet, Text based websites are soooo 1980s.

A post from yola.com depicted clearly, the need to strike a balance between visual and text content on a website.

It is said that your readers often create impressions about your website in just 50 milliseconds, so do you think huge chunk of text is going to help the reader to form a really nice opinion about your website, instead a nice image would attract attention and if the reader likes it, he/she would move further. 

This technique is risky, because if the reader does not like the image, you'll receive a "hmmf" and the reader will move along.  As is evident, until now, the article is actually in confirmation to a few concepts of Website/ SEO Psychology.

However, It has a much higher probability of luring the readers into reading/ using your website than a chunk of smart looking text.

But you know, anything in excess is never good. So how do you know, if you've over-rainbowed your website. How do you know when your website stops being an informative/productive/inspiring website and starts becoming an abomination made by an overweight pixie puking colorful paste?

Too many Images? BLUNDER!

In simple words, Adding too many images for a webpage (not a website) can cause some serious repercussions,

1. Image will load glacially slow (That means so slow, that you’ll grow a beard). Your page speed will suffer and so will you.
2. If you do not use a free resource like blogger, you’ll need to host the images somewhere, hosting needs space for storage and that would require money which will be taken from your pocket.
3. Also too many images sometime puts off the readers. They get the impression that you did not have enough content and so you’re compensating by adding lots and lots of images.

Too less Images? BLOOPER!

But if you have too less images, it can cause some serious damage too.

1. Less images would bore your visitors, If numerous images would have you growing flowing beard then after 5 minutes of lengthy article without images, you will have a bored skeleton sitting in front of a computer.
2. Lesser images without significant breaks lead to people skipping some juicy parts of your article.

Images on Website Type?

Just like your Bounce rate depends of the type of website you have, similarly in the case of images, it all depends on the type of work you do. If you're a photographer or a design enthusiast, your website will have to show in the same manner. If you're a brooding extra mindful persona, you'll automatically use”no nonsense full of text” methodology. The eye tracking study of web readers by nngroup claim that users will read more text on newspaper websites than they do at any websites.

Psychologically, this is because they actually visit the newspaper websites to gain information, to know about things and also because many people sitting at offices are not able to visit many websites and hence resort to the ones that are not blocked by their IT dept./Government (Digress..) The same analogy can be seen in links too. People often say, the higher the number of links you have better is your page, but it’s not true every time.

The Results

My philosophy is to micromanage and document. At codemakit I tend to delve deep and after research I put forward values and processed data. For Example, The Ideal blog posting schedule for a week  or The one about what page rank should you have to reach top 500 of all websites, So here I have attempted to micromanage and tell how many images are optimum for a webpage (for different types of webpages).

Mind you, the table is created after hours of grueling research, using two different methods for the analysis and comparing. The study revolved around the top 500 websites of the world by Alexa as per 11th June 2014. Several websites were selected. Ones in language other than English were rooted out. Ones that need authentication (like Facebook, Reddit etc.) before letting the visitors enter were removed. Ones with objectionable content were not considered.

Finally the values are arrived by using weighted average method. The complete Study on "The Optimum Number of Images for a Website Type" is available now in pdf.

Type	Images
Forum Type Websites	7
Photosharing Websites	10
Brand Specific Websites	10
Banking Websites	12
Shopping Websites	35
Product review Websites	56
Group Blogs	83
Newspaper Group Websites	130
Entertainment Websites	145

So what is bad? Bad is when you mix things up. When a simple blogger uses so many images that the page uses an hour to load on the reader's computer. When loaded the page greets the user now sitting with a face full of white beard. If you’re so hell bent on using images for every little piece of text you have, use it in awesome ebook covers and magazines. But remember “The moment you overdo anything, you're in trouble.”

Note,

Google webmaster guidelines clearly state, you should not embed important text in images, use alt text for images, also the image must be conducive to the text you've published (You do not see an image of a puppy in this webpage, because it is out of context)

But nowhere has anything been mentioned about the optimum number of images a webpage might have (Not even the hyped “How search Works” by Google. So, I posted a question at Google’s Webmaster Forum in search of professional opinion. You can see the topic here, But There was no response from that side. Maybe my question was convoluted. :-(

This was about,

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Why do you need a multilingual website

Learn how you lose about 95% of your visitors and how to get them back. Demographics play an exceedingly pivotal role in determining the fate of your website. Language does pose a barrier if you want your blog to go truly global. 

Codemakit ran an article on “Why do some countries hate your website?” answering the question how a simple change in spelling can cause your blog to stop receives visitors/readers from certain countries. On similar lines, the language in which your blog was written in bounds the overall reach of your blog.

Languages Based on Mother Tongue

According to Wikipedia, the percentage of world population speaking English is about 5.43%. Considering many WebPages and websites are now made in English, you would wonder, that you're losing about 94.57 % of your potential readers just by writing in English!

Table 1 : Languages (Mother Tongue) spoken by people around the world

Rank	Language	Native speakers (millions)	% of world population
1,	Mandarin	955*	14.40%
2,	Spanish	405*	6.15%
3,	English	360*	5.43%
4,	Hindi	310*	4.70%
5,	Arabic	,295*	4.43%

Source : Wikipedia Retrieved on 10th June 2014

Here comes the need for a language specific approach towards webpage creation. But there is a catch; the above data is basically for mother tongues. So 5.43% of the world's population has their mother tongue as English. (Now the figures do not disappoint).

Languages Acquired By Readers

But what if your mother tongue is not English and for answers you have to look towards English content on the web. So you use the language skills hammered in by your teachers at school and look for content published in English. Using this scenario in mind, you get almost 27% of the world as your potential readers. (Now that is pretty and believable)

Table 2 : Languages (Acquired) spoken by people around the world

Rank	Language	Internet users	Percentage
1	English	565004000	27.00%
2	Chinese	509965000	25.00%
3	Spanish	164969000	8.00%
4	Japanese	99182000	5.00%
5	Portuguese	82587000	4.00%

Source : Wikipedia Retrieved on 10th June 2014

Languages of Existing Webpages

In the previous Para we discussed a problem. A Problem often faced by readers all over the world. You do not find WebPages with content in your language. Would you like to hear what the language most websites are made of is? The answer not surprising is English or Anglais (I'm learning French). But what alarms is not the language, but the sheer number of WebPages using the language. What would be your estimate? Huh? 20% or 25% or 35%? Prepare to be floored; it is a whopping 56%, followed by 6% of Russian and 6% of German.

Table 3 : Webpages Existing on the web (Based on Languages)

Rank	Language	Percentage
1	English	55.70%
2	Russian	6.00%
3	German	6.00%
4	Japanese	5.00%
5	Spanish	4.60%

Source : Wikipedia Retrieved on 10th June 2014

This was the problem I was talking about. You need answers; you have a presentation/ test/ viva tomorrow and all you find are WebPages in English. Hence you force yourself to plough deep into the webpage and try to understand the obscure language (The sentence might be futile for codemakit readers reading the blog in English). This might lead to visitors leaving webpage in search of a non Shakespearean website where the language is much simpler. This would increase your bounce rate, maybe this is the reason why your blog is not growing.

A Comparison

Here's a comparison of the languages discussed above.

Table 4 : Comparison of Languages, Based on demographics, Analytics and Website Content.

Rank	Language (Mother tongue)	Language (Internet Users)	Language (Website Content)
1	Mandrin	English	English
2	Spanish	Chinese	Russian
3	English	Spanish	German
4	Hindi	Japanese	Japanese
5	Arabic	Portuguese	Spanish

Source : Wikipedia Retrieved on 10th June 2014

Conclusion

In conclusion, it is evident from the fact that we would always like to be presented with content in our language, and the apparent lack of content on the web based on reader demographics, we should strive towards WebPages/ Websites with localized content presented in local languages. Even General Elections of countries were affected because of such tactics. Online Giants are doing it (Example : the Case of Wikipedia) and so should you (Unless you’re a potato blogger)

This answered your Question

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