Ah, yes, it’s that time once again: the magical trip through various sites that haven’t done much in the way of testing and assume that everyone has their background color set to white. But first, as usual, a rundown of the sites from last time to see if any corrections have been made.

Of the three Refresh sites (Refresh Dallas, Refresh DC and Refresh Phoenix) , two of them finally did define background colors for their pages. Refresh Dallas, however, seems content to not fix the problem.

Wow, the two Coke pages I notice before have been fixed. That’s a big surprise, since pages like that normally never get looked at again. Nevertheless, they now have backgrounds defined: Coca-Cola’s Make Every Drop Count and the HTML page noted before. Makes me want to try and choke down a Diet Black Cherry Vanilla Coke (truly one of the worst tasting drinks ever).

Google, though, is still the same. Their Analytics sign-in page, AdSense Tour, and Email Switch page are still as flawed as before.

Now, for some new contestants. First up, Graphic Design USA. Somehow, I think it is worse when sites that attempt to educate about graphic design or web technologies can’t manage to get their own pages right. Here’s what I see when I visit the GD USA site. Estimated time to fix? A few minutes if you type slowly.

Next on the hit parade: Ask.com. Hey, Ask.com, why does your CSS not define a background color? It was better when Jeeves was around. My view of the Ask.com page. Note that the greyish text below the form field is unreadable with my color settings. That’s because they assumed I’d be using a white background. Yet another two-minute fix.

Another company that should know better? Quark. They just spent a bunch of money getting a new logo, then spent more getting another new logo. I guess they didn’t have enough money to spend defining their pages’ background-color. How Quark’s home page looks to me. Their problem? Well, way too much CSS, for one thing. Buried in their code is this:

#pagebackground	{
  margin:0;
  padding:0;
  color:inherit;
  background:transparent;
}

Eliminate the “background: transparent” and the problem is fixed. Took me about 5 minutes to find and eliminate the problem.

SketchUp definitely needs a background color defined.

Finally, sort of an amusing one. Just Keep the Change is a self-proclaimed “Web Design Weblog.” Recently, the author did a post on The All Time Top 5 Designs. One thing that all five of the designs do that Keep the Change doesn’t do? That’s right. They all define their background colors.

That’s it for this time. Let’s see if any of this week’s batch correct their mistakes.

Update: Three days after I linked to Keep the Change, looks like the author fixed the problem. While he mentions that he independently discovered the problem, which is indeed possible, I think the timing makes it likely that my critique had something to do with it.

Update 2: Refresh Dallas has updated their pages, yay! In the comments, Jeff Adams suggest that I shoot some email to folks who I put on the hitlist, and I think that’s a good idea. After all, for sites like Keep The Change and the Refresh Dallas sites, there are people who can pretty easily correct the problems. I’ll definitely keep that in mind for next month’s version!

Define Your Background Color Flickr set

Others In the Series

• Define Your Background Color, Double Dammit!
• Define Your Background Color, Dammit!
• Sites That Need White Backgrounds, Redux
• Sites That Need White Backgrounds

Technorati Tags: web standards, background colors, css, web design, quark, ask.com

This entry was posted on Monday, March 27th, 2006 at 9:34 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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