In my ongoing battle against lazy designers, coders, and testers, here’s another edition of "Define Your Background Color." A big thanks to Dan for helping to spot more offenders.
Nothing is better than getting like minded individuals together to discuss topics of web design. It’s a great idea and I fully support it. However, if you are going to link to seven sites about creative Web design groups and three of the seven sites (Refresh Dallas, Refresh DC and Refresh Phoenix) manage to not define a background color on their pages, it kind of makes you think. I’m not doing this to be mean: designers and coders need to understand the usability and accessibility issues when they forget to test. Always test with a variety of Web settings, not just the plain vanilla default. Here are the screenshots on a browser with the browser’s background color changed (and thanks to Dan again for a great suggestion: set your browser’s default background color to something really weird and the problems are even more apparent):
Update, February 11, 2006: Looks like Refresh Phoenix has corrected their page. Yay!
Update, February 13, 2006: And now Refresh DC has corrected their page. That leaves just one!
Large companies aren’t any better, despite the millions of dollars they spend on their advertising. Would Coca-Cola put a television ad on the air if it had lousy lighting? Probably not. Yet they have no problem putting up a Flash piece with transparency enabled: Coca-Cola’s Make Every Drop Count. Here’s what I see: Coke Screenshot. The HTML page following it isn’t any better. And what I see. (Another big thanks to Dan for showing me this one!)
A recent link on Digg.com about Google finally getting a graphic designer is amusing to me. It does seem like Google has new folks involved on their sites. And they need to define their background colors, too. Here’s Google Analytics (you may need to log out to see the problem) and here it is in spectacular "Define Your Background Color-Vision." Same people probably did their Adsense Tour. The link in the Digg article also has the same problem: Google Mail Switch Page.
Define Your Background Color Flickr set
Others In the Series
- Define Your Background Color, Dammit!
- Sites That Need White Backgrounds, Redux
- Sites That Need White Backgrounds
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 9th, 2006 at 9:43 pm and is filed under Web Standards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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