Website Text & Backgrounds

Fox News changed the format of their website http://www.foxnews.com, and quite frankly I liked it the old way better. The format change prompted me to rant a little bit. Their new format is too bright. I hate text on a white background on the internet. It's fine for paper, but it sucks when reading on a monitor.

Here's the deal, and more and more people are starting to say the same. Staring at a screen that is mostly white is about as bad as staring directly at a soft-white lightbulb. It begins to hurt your eyes after a short while. A lot of people are finding that a slightly darker background or a dark background with light text is far easier on the eyes, since a monitor is backlit. In essence, a monitor really is like a big lightbulb with text, colors, and pictures.

Of course there are the funky colored text on colored backgrounds can get pretty awful too. Ever try to read a site with red letters against a funky brown background or lime green letters against blue? Okay, those are the exceptions, but they are out there and I generally click away from them as soon as they load.

Anyways, I haven't yet had any complaints about my format yet, though I'm sure they will come. I tried to get a mix of background shading that doesn't hurt the eyes, isn't too bright or too dark, which lets the black text show with plenty of contrast. For me, it's easy to read, easy to see, doesn't give me headache looking at it. But then again, I went through any number of variations until I hit on something that (at least to me) didn't look awful.