I missed April: too much work, not enough time. This month’s entries will be short and sweet. I’ll also be emailing the sites this month (assuming I can find some form of contact information for them).

And, for newcomers, here’s the deal: when using CSS to control your site’s design, it’s important to realize that not everyone keeps the browser defaults. So, for example, if you forget to define a background color in your CSS, the browser will display the default color. If you haven’t changed your default, you’ll be fine, since these designers assume you have a white background. However, if you are like me (and many others), you may have changed that default to something not white. And that’s where the problems begin.

A recap of last month’s fun: pretty bad, still. Of the new sites mentioned, only one corrected the problem (which he found independently). But GD USA, Quark, Ask.com, and the others are still sporting the default.

May’s Offenders

Visa

First up, Visa. I’m using a dark grey background this month, and you can see the havoc it plays on the navigation on the site. Actually, you can’t see the havoc, since my lovely grey background is the same color as the navigation.

• Price of Ad Agency Design and Coding? $10,000
• Price of Quality Assurance Testing? $2000
• Price of Adding a “background-color: #fff” to the CSS? $0
• Eliminating a Big Accessibility and Usability Problem? Priceless

I’ve sent email to them, let’s see what they do.

TMZ.com

Next contestant: The TMZ.com site, which is some sort of AOL news/gossip/entertainment site. I don’t even know what “TMZ” stands for. And here’s what I see. Again, this was another 5 second fix (I type slowly). It amazes me that such high profile sites look like this. I’ve sent email to them, as well.

Update: Looks like they fixed the problem! That was quick! I still don’t know what ‘TMZ” stands for, though.

The ITtoolbox Sites

I always love the tutorial sites that attempt to teach you something, but fail to do the bare minimum testing of looking at their site in something other than a plain-jane configured browser. Such is the entire ITtoolbox set of sites, including, amusingly, their Web Design section. Here’s their page on Web Design/Layout issues and here’s my view of it.

Others In the Series

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

Define Your Background Color Flickr set

Technorati Tags: web standards, background colors, css, web design, visa, aol

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 2nd, 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.

Comment on this entry

The URI to TrackBack this entry is:
http://strangematter.net/2006/05/02/124/trackback