Web Pages That Suck - learn good web design by looking at bad web design

Xerox

Submitter’s comments: There are too many web sites I can’t really read because the text isn’t dark enough. I’m older (63) with some eye problems, but I spend large sums of money on products for my company that I research on the web. I’d at least like to be able to read about what I’m buying. I find Xerox’s home page difficult to read. If you mouse over the “Document Outsourcing” link at the top, you get black text on a dark purple background.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The harder it is to read a web page the easier it becomes for your visitors to hit the BACK button and go to a site they can read. In order to read a web page, you need enough contrast between the text color and the background color. This isn’t rocket science. I’ll even  give you a simple guide that shows which shades of black to use for text on a white background.

Why do designers do that voodoo that they do so well? In an article entitled, Has Your Web Designer Ever Heard of Contrast? a plausible explanation is given:

The reason is… gray text looks better and more coherentwhen seen from a distance or as an element of the overall design, but, and this is a big but, it is not meant to be read in these cases…

…Unfortunately, some visual designers sacrifice readability for a slight increase in visual appeal because they do not really read the text on screen; they treat it as a large block of horizontal lines, and the darker those lines are the uglier they look. So, decreasing the contrast a little makes the overall design look nicer but less readable. Poor readability is not the designer’s problem. After all, he will probably never try to use the site he designed.

I noted that a recent Daily Sucker, TechSoup, was using #666 for some of their text, which made it difficult to read. I noticed that today’s sucker, Xerox, also uses #666 for sections of their text. As the submitter mentioned, mousing over the “Document Outsourcing” link is not pleasant. It gets worse. The Xerox for Small and Medium Businesses page adds hard-to-read link colors.

It seemed to me like important web sites were all conspiring at the same time. Perhaps I felt this way because A&E and the History Channel have been running shows about the end of the world with predictions from Nostradamus, the Aztecs, and everybody and his brother and watched too many of them (I’m not watching anything political.)

Then it hit me. The number 666 is the Number of the Beast. This is all coming to me as a revelation on…9-9-9, which is “666″ inverted. Yes, Nostraflanders has uncovered a plot on this special day to ruin web sites. #666 is Satan’s CSS! If you don’t believe me, look at the photo above. This is proof!

In the movie The Usual Suspects, the character Verbal Kint says, “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

At Web Pages That Suck, Nostraflanders says, “The second greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing web designers the people could read text colored #666.”

Update: Xerox changed their site. I’ll try to post a video soon (vf 10-17-11)

Xerox