Welcome to my world!

November 18, 2016

I Can't Read Your Blog

I'm making an attempt to look at all the participating members on the NaBloPoMo blogroll. But sometimes it's hard.

What usually makes it hard is that the blog is difficult to read because of design, color choices, or both.

If you use a very pale gray font on a white background, your text is almost invisible. At best, it looks like it's been "grayed out", like a nonfunctioning portion of the page - except that it's the whole page. At worst, I can't see it unless I highlight it. Oddly, I think this may be the default template for some blogging platforms, but it's not a very good choice. Dark gray on a black background presents a similar problem, as does white on cyan. Most people need some contrast between the background and the font in order to read the content.

Extraordinarily bright colors, or a neon-like contrast is also a problem. For example, a black background with bright blue or cyan font. Yes, there is contrast, but it's painful to look at.

If you have a very busy background image, it may be hard to read your blog, as it's difficult to see where the curlicues end and the words begin.

If your page has no boundaries, so that it spreads out all the way across my very wide screen, I may or may not feel like resizing my browser so I can read it more easily. If your font is really tiny, so that I have to squint or change my screen settings - I won't bother.

If you are more interested in advertising than in blogging, with lots of text ads inserted between most of your paragraphs, or so many display ads that I can't find your blog posts among them, I'm not going to stick around.

By now, everyone should know not to write in all caps. But some people still do it.

Please, if you want your message to reach people, make it easy for them to get it.
 

6 fabulous comments:

  1. I agree! I used to do web design, and checking for readability was one of the most important things I did

    ReplyDelete
  2. If I may add to your rant: I can read most people's blogs but sometimes I can't comment and would like to leave a nice word or 10. This especially happens to me with some Blogger blogs - they want a name and password and when I enter it says it is wrong. Or they ask for Open ID and other stuff I don't know what the heck it is. Not the blogger's fault but still, I can't comment.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for your comment!

      Yes, I always feel shortchanged if there is no good way to comment. Some kinds of barriers may be the blogger's fault to some extent - most blogging platforms allow us at least a little bit of choice over how comments are handled. I choose to have moderated comments, to keep the spammers and trolls at bay.

      Delete

We love comments from our readers.

Your comment will appear after approval by the moderator. Spam will not be allowed.