Web Pages That Suck - learn good web design by looking at bad web design

I’m tired of reading articles about “Websites That Will Inspire You” that feature sites that don’t follow web standards for contrast. These standards are for the visually impaired, but you don’t have to be blind to not be able to read the content on many websites.

As AccessKeys points out:

“The W3C recommends a standard of 500 or greater for the color difference and a standard of 125 or greater for color brightness.” These recommendations are in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0.

Some designers act that these standards are only important if you want to have an accessible website. If we were only concerned about accessibility, we could just say, “Screw ’em, they’re blind” and go on the way we’ve been going for years. Unfortunately, people who aren’t blind or vision impaired have difficulty reading these pages.

I’m not asking much, I just want to read your text and see what you have to say is of interest. If I can’t read it, I will leave it. So will anyone with a brain in their head.

Since I don’t critique web design firms as it would appear to be a conflict of interest (even though I don’t offer design services), I won’t point out which websites suck in the following article. Fortunately, the article is not just limited to design firms.

My readers are smart. You’ll be able to figure out which websites suck.

Stop Promoting Websites That Don’t Follow Web Standards And Are Hard To Read