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

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It’s an important website. It’s one you should be reading. It’s one that’s difficult to read unless you’re on a laptop, Mac (I assume) or an iPhone (although the text is a little small).

What’s the problem. Contrast, of course. The home page is readable on my laptop—but it’s about five inches closer to my face than my desk monitor. Yeah, yeah, I know. Everything is fine if you’re close enough. But it fails the W3C guidelines for contrast. AccessColor reports that:

The W3C recommends a standard of 500 or greater for the color difference and a standard of 125 or greater for color brightness.

Based on these considerations, the results for this page are:

1. Both color difference and color brightness do not meet the recommended standard for 18.11% of the total text.
2. Either color difference or color brightness does not meet the recommended standard for 67.32% of the total the text.

You can see the first part of the results in this screenshot.

TNW has some front/backend issues, too. Yslow gives the home page a score of 59 and Page Speed gives it an 89. Yslow seems to score web pages like it’s the Olympics. Page Speed seems to score like it’s the Special Olympics.

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