and it’s shame that so many sites with good content are going that way. I could go into a fine rant on the nature of the eyeball and the design goals of video monitors, but it mainly comes down to common sense. Sullivan has given his readers the option of choosing a color scheme, but most who use quirky design don’t. Please, folks, black on white. The eye needs contrast and definition or the brain can’t digest your thoughts.
White on black websites are hard to read
and it’s shame that so many sites with good content are going that way. I could go into a fine rant on the nature of the eyeball and the design goals of video monitors, but it mainly comes down to common sense. Sullivan has given his readers the option of choosing a color scheme, but … Continue reading “White on black websites are hard to read”
I couldn’t agree more.. it’s why i have sucha tough time navigating Libertarian Samizdata.. great articles, but lousy fotn+background combination.. white on blue.. eeks..
Come to think of it, Suman, your website is one of the best-designed blogs around. Blogger newbies should use it as a model.
Perfect timing for these comments. I was messing around last night with the site re-design and was torn between a slick white-on-black look and classic black-on-white. Didn’t want to look like all the other Movable Type bloggers. But I was thinkin’ there must be some neurological argument for the latter. Now I have chosen the righteous path.
One more sinner saved from corruption. Since you’re using Movable Type, there’s something you should be aware of about how it handles fonts. The default style sheet for MT sizes all fonts in pixels, typically very small numbers of pixels. By forcing the font to a certain size, it makes it impossible for the font to scale to a proportional size on screens with different resolutions. So you can make your blog look great on the screen you normally use, but it will look like total crap – fonts either too big or too small – to anybody with a larger or smaller screen. The best way to deal with the font size question, IMHO, is to simply remove all font-size settings for the major stuff, such as blog entry, which leaves them to the control of the user (view -> text size -> under IE.) Then you size the things you want smaller in percentages (font-size:80%) instead of absolute units. Then everybody’s happy.
How difficult is movable type? I am now getting really tired of blogger dying on me 2-3 times a day, and I think I am going to move to another server and install movable type.
It’s fairly easy to install and setup, and it imports entries from Blogger so you get your history right away.
The main problems you’ll have are file permissions during the installation, and then screwing around with the style sheet if you don’t already know about that kinda stuff.
You can use Blogger Pro on a non-Blogspot server can’t you? It might be easier than learning a new system, and it seems to have all the spiffy features.
I never could figure out how to make a Blogger Blog look presentable, so I just went to Movable Type straightaway to convert my vanity site into an archived blog.