A couple days ago, Roger Johansson published a complaint about the problems he’d been encountering recently with light text on dark backgrounds. It’s an interesting subject – is there a distinct usability difference between dark text on light versus light text on dark? For Roger, there’s no question – light text causes pain. If it hurts, it’s not going to happen. But how general is this kind of problem? Roger points out an interesting quote from designer Mark Boulton specifying […]
Continue reading “On the readability of inverted color schemes” »Category: Usability
Uglifying a blog, or increasing usability?
Christian Montoya recently posted his Top 10 Ways to Uglify Your Blog. I take issue with most of his points – and so I’m setting out to refute his opinions. It’s clear to me that Christian is writing primarily from the perspective of a designer, so I’m going to make a point to address the issues from a usability and marketing perspective. I’m not disagreeing with every point; let me make that clear – but I will address all 10 […]
Continue reading “Uglifying a blog, or increasing usability?” »So…what’s a blog?
There’s an interesting tendency amongst both the techno-literate and the less technologically savvy to look at the "blog" as a separate creature from a website. I’ve heard a wide variety of perspectives; ranging from clients trying to decide whether they wanted a blog or a website to experts discussing blogs in a separate quantification than so-called normal websites. Just look at the titles of articles – Programming your Blog or Website, Collect Data on your Blog or Website, or How […]
Continue reading “So…what’s a blog?” »Philipp Lenssen on Web Standards
Philipp Lenssen, of Google Blogoscoped, has written his top 9 Ways to Misunderstand Web Standards. This is a must-read! The comments are pretty good, too – although certainly some of them just don’t get it: QUOTE: when your image is a mere illustration to a point you’re repeating elsewhere in the text, there’s no need at all to use the alt text. Absolutely wrong. There is much benefit to be had, most notably for search engines. In general I find […]
Continue reading “Philipp Lenssen on Web Standards” »Being Obsessive about Web Standards
Alice Tappart had an article today at WebProNews which was rather interesting. Primarily a tongue-in-cheek appraisal of Why Web Standards Could Be Making You Ill, the article does have serious points. When it comes right down to it, the article is warning that an obsession about validation and web standards is not as important as ensuring you’ve provided great content. This is true, for the most part. Websites have errors. Undoubtedly, this site has a few errors here and there. […]
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