There are many good reasons to use placeholder text to define your web designs. But what many designers don't realize is that there are also many good reasons not to use dummy text on web page layouts after the initial testing.
Text is Meant to Be Read
The reason most designers use lorem ipsum text in preliminary designs is to force the site reviewers to ignore the text and just focus on the design elements on the page. Every designer has experienced the review session where the reviewers found 13 typos in the sample text that was used, or decided that the 10-word marketing text really should be 12. And so on. This can be really frustrating when you're trying to decide between a 2-column layout and a 3-column layout.
But once you're past the initial design phase, the placeholder text should be replaced with content that is as close to what will really be there as you can possibly get. Because text on web pages is meant to be read. Nonsense text or unreadable latin text will force reviewers to ignore the fact that the column is so wide or narrow that the scan-line is impossible. Or that the font size is too small for most people to read. Because they aren't reading the text.
Character Counts Can Make a Difference in Designs for Text
On one site I worked on, there was space for approximately 50 characters in this one section of the page. But the data feed that delivered that content was a 128 character element. We decided to always cut the feed off at a word end just before character 46 and add " ..." at the end, so that customers would click on the text and go to the rest of it. This seemed to make sense if you think that most entries were 128 characters or a little less. But actually, most entries were around 55-60 characters long. Customers would click on the text and invariably get one additional word. If we had used actual content in the testing, we would have seen that and lengthened the amount available. As it was, we didn't find this out until the content was live.
Pages May be Too Long or Too Short
When I use placeholder text, I typically use between two and four paragraphs of text. But if the content that is going to go on the page is longer or shorter than that, the page may look really strange, or hard to read. This is most often seen in column designs. The designer creates a design for 3 columns with equal amounts of text. But when the content is placed in the columns, one is 1 paragraph, one is 5 paragraphs, and the third 2 paragraphs. The middle column is so long that there is a huge empty space below the other two columns.
Web Forms Can Turn into Nightmares for Customers
One of the craziest uses of placeholder text is in forms designs. In many design planss I've seen form designs as two fields for the name and email address and then the words “more form fields here”. Then when the form content is created 15-20 form fields are added below the first two fields. More about User-Friendly Forms.
Translations Can Make Things Even Harder
Keep in mind that even after you remove the placeholder text and put in real content that the page will use that you're still not out of the woods. If your page is going to be translated, you should look at it in the translations as well. In one design I worked on, large chunks of the navigation disappeaered when we translated from English to Spanish and German. Because the translations were longer than the English text and the navigation was built to be just the right length for the English text, the longer Spanish and German words pushed the navigation elements completely out of the visible element. Thank goodness, we caught that one before we launched.
Use Placeholder Text for Initial Designs
Placeholder text definitely has a place in design, but think about it before you just slap it into every page design you have. Once you've determined the layout, you should start using actual text in your designs. Yes, you'll have to deal with reviewers who critique the text more than the design, but you'll also find problems you wouldn't have found with “Lorem ipsum...”
