Submitter #1’s comments: The web site TV.com, a television show-oriented website.

I’ve been a member there since 2005, within a month of them taking over the old TVTOME website, and a show editor for almost as long.

They just redid the site in an eye-searing white background that gives a lot of people headaches (see the poll in forums under “community”), and, in my own experience, is DOG slow. One of the chief reasons for the site taking as much as 10-30 seconds to show anything at all (on a 1.7 GHz Athlon running Windows 2000 — which is much faster than XP or Vista under both Opera 8 *and* IE6) are most of the data pages. It’s downright painful to use the site.

There was no beta testing, no warning, and no feedback. They just announced the radical changes a week before full implementation. Pretty much did everything possible to make it easy for them, mechanically, but bad for users.

This doesn’t compare to some sites for how bad it is, but when you consider that this is not some two-bit site — the number of graphic designers and web designers involved could not have been small — it’s pretty bad.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Not every site that makes the Daily Sucker is a “Car Wreck on the Information Highway.” This site qualifies because they don’t understand the concept of contrast. For the clueless web designers out there, please read Wikipedia’s definition of contrast. This site gives a really great demonstration of contrast in action.

When I checked TV’com’s home page at AccessColor, the report it generated said:

Both color difference and color brightness do not meet the recommended standard for 18.51% of the total text.

Either color difference or color brightness does not meet the recommended standard for 12.99% of the total the text.

Text on background with images is for 46.26% of the total text.

Basically, 31.5% of the text lacked sufficient contrast.

Ironically, the poll page was a bigger failure with a total of 77.81% of the text lacking sufficient contrast. To make matters worse, it’s very difficult to read the text in the comments because the font size is so small.

As I said in my article, the Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015, you don’t design (or redesign) a web site to meet your needs but to meet your customer’s needs. Obviously, that isn’t the case here.

TV.com