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

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Submitter’s comments: None.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: These folks are so totally unfreaking clear on the concept that they really need to be slapped.

If I remember correctly, “Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site” was one of the first articles on the topic that normals could almost understand. What’s really disturbing about this long, long article is that they’re using #666 for the text color and we all know that #666 is Satan’s CSS.

With #666 there’s not enough contrast between the text and the white background to easily read the article. This is especially bad because the article is so long. Oh, and lack of contrast is a problem because the W3C recommends a standard of 500 or greater for the color difference and a standard of 125 or greater for color brightness and #666 doesn’t cut it.

As I said in the Daily Sucker for 9-9-9, “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.”

This horrible text color is EXTREMELY popular because it’s what the CoolKid designers use. I know that KidsToday don’t read, but there are still lots of people who do and this article on speeding up your web site can’t be put into pretty pictures and putting some of the concepts into an 8-minute video isn’t terribly helpful. Here are a lot more performance-related videos. Right now, Google is one of the main sources for information on the topic. Gosh. Even though the text is small, you can read it. What a concept!

Yahoo! Developer Network