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

Vincent Flanders’ comments: My personal experience with one of the RightNow services was extremely positive. They offer clients a chat feature where you can ask questions and I needed to get a form from a medical company faxed to me. The system worked like a champ. Out of curiosity, I went to RightNow’s home page and an insanely glaring error was right there on the front page…

…the text on the bottom third of the page couldn’t be read because IT WAS TOO SMALL. My first reaction was, “When they signed off on this project, did anybody look at the home page? Didn’t they see they couldn’t see and read the text?

There are times when it’s acceptable to use small text and there are times when a lack of contrast is acceptable—on the botttom of the page where you have legal statements like on the Wachovia bank site. The WebPagesThatSuck legal and privacy statement also uses little contrast and small text, which you can see when you look at the original version.

I keep screaming about the idiots who make the text hard/impossible to read because of the lack of contrast. At least they can make the bogus claim, “It’s artistic.” Small text is small text and artistic expression doesn’t apply.

RightNow