#19. Worst Non-Profit Web Site of 2007 — Department of Spanish and Portuguese, UC Berkeley

Vincent Flanders’ comments: When I first viewed the site in Internet Explorer, I assumed it was designed to work only in Firefox. Nope. It’s messed up in both browsers.

My pet peeve is lack of contrast between text and background so I ran the home page through AccessColor and found out “Both color difference and color brightness do not meet the recommended standard for 29.91% of the total text.”

This site is bad in ways I don’t think I’ve seen before — the strange use of type is especially puzzling. Very bizarre.

Actually, the most bizarre aspect of the home page is that it is “Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict!” Yes, we have proof that a page of valid code is still FUBAR.

Other comments #1: Too much "clever" typography that doesn't work.

It is never a good idea to have columns that don't fit single words. I get: "sea rch this web site",
"cale ndar of events", "our libra ry on-line" and "subs cribe to the RSS feeds". My favorite though is "Reso urces where to find mo re information"

Also the leading is suck, so that lines overlap -- especially the "Faculty Web Logs"

This is in Opera on a PC.

Other comments #2: Well, when you look at it without reading the text, it looks like one of those early newspapers (only this time with colour).

What I really don\'t like is how text is large on the top and shrinks as you scroll down ! The green text in the yellowish background is horrible !

Department of Spanish and Portuguese, UC Berkeley