One thing that’s really annoys me while browsing is a site that assumes you use the color “white” as your default browser background. I use gray. So all those great images that have been antialiased for a white background look like crap. Also, since I’m not using the expected background color, the text color can sometimes be illegible or washed out.

I can’t stress testing things like this more strongly. Never make assumptions about your users’ browsers: test designs not only in a variety of browsers, but also in a variety of configurations. Some of the designers I’ve worked with were pretty good about creating designs that were compatible with the users’ desires: work well with different font sizes, screen sizes, etc. Others were, shall we say, not all that interested in the user: they would create designs that would break if the user used just a slightly larger font size, for example, or would insist on their design being font-locked at 12pt Arial.

I’m somewhat of the belief in relative units: percentages, ems, etc. I think a lot of designers fall back on using fixed point or pixel sizes because their designs are not well thought out. It’s the easy way to make sure the user can’t break the “look” of the page. Blah. At least Opera and Firefox allow you to either increase the size or zoom in on those pages.

List of Some Sites That Need Explicit White Backgrounds

Most of these can be fixed just by adding a background-color: #fff; to the css for the body tag, assuming that there are no inline styles overwriting it.

• Averatec (home page is fine, but product pages are not)
• Bluetake
• MSNBC
• Music From the Movies
• PhysOrg.com
• Sony Style (home page is fine, but product pages are not)
• Pocket PC Central

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 19th, 2005 at 10:16 am and is filed under Web Standards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

Comment on this entry

The URI to TrackBack this entry is:
http://strangematter.net/2005/03/19/18/trackback