Define Your Background Color, June

June 17, 2006, 8:25 pm ET by Vincent J. Murphy

Time once again to delve into one of the mysteries of Web development; namely, Web designers and developers who can spend many many hours on a site, yet still forget to define a background color for their pages.

As usual, let’s take a look back at last month’s offenders. For each of these sites, I sent detailed information on the problem and how to fix it:

  • Visa: unfixed and still problematic when using a different background color.
  • TMZ.com: fixed, and quite quickly: within a day of my mention of it.
  • ITtoolbox: unfixed.

So, one for three last month. Not bad, I guess. I did not get any email back from any of the sites.

Now onto this month’s problem sites. As usual, I’ll send email (if I can find suitable contact information) to each site and we’ll see how long it takes for them to fix the problem (if they fix it at all). This week, all the backgrounds are a soothing blue, the current default background of my browsers.

Apani

Apani is a network security company (I came across them while looking for VPN solutions for Mac OS X). As is typical with the problem sites, the fix is just to add a "background-color: #fff;" to the stylesheet body selector. Time to fix: the usual couple of minutes.

Screenshot of Apani.com

Kana

Kana provides various customer relation services, like a natural language search engine, call center integration, etc. I guess testing their Web site design isn’t one of their "core competencies."

Screenshot of Kana.com

Project D.U.

What’s with these gossip/news web sites with weird names that can’t manage to get their background colors right? Project D.U. boasts that their "network of 30 bloggers are viewed as the best in the biz." What they really need, though, is to test their site with browsers that aren’t using the defaults. (Note: Project D.U. is “Presented by AT&T.” AT&T is also my employer.)

Update: As noted in the comments, Project D.U. has corrected the problem! Yay! They win this month’s "Quickest Fix" award.

Norelco’s Shave Everywhere

A special bonus problem site: Norelco’s very amusing Shave Everywhere site. I’m sure that they spent a lot of money to create the site. Apparently, though, they could not afford to put a background color on their page.

Screenshot of ShaveEverywhere.com

Others In the Series

Define Your Background Color Flickr set

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Responses to “Define Your Background Color, June”

  1. sunni thompson Says:

    when you first noticed this issue (back in january), i sent an email to our programmers requesting the change be made. it was either never done or it was accidentally deleted…. i’ve put the request in again, and i promise it will be corrected by the end of the day.

    June 20th, 2006 at 10:03 am |

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