Jack William Bell's Journal: Superficiality versus Content (aka /. is too ugly)

Left in Front thinks that /. is too ugly to link to and goes on to opine that "In this day and age, superficiality most times supercedes content." Brendyn then goes on to beg the /. people to overhaul the look and feel.

Uh... Well sure /. is ugly, that I cannot deny. But I do believe that Content wins the race, at least for me. And, well, how can I put this with the proper tact... Readability is also paramount and, Brendyn, white text on a pink background is not a good choice. Please click through to a good color chooser and pick something a bit more legible.

Update: After reloading LiF I apparently picked up a missing CSS stylesheet and now most of the text is a more readable brown on pink, however the article headings and some other bits of text are still white (or a light grey that is nearly as bad). So the complaint remains, but I feel less strongly about it. At least so long as the stylesheet loads correctly.

Ick.

[MarkusQ]

for those of us out there who care solely about looks when we first see something

Ick.

I wonder how much better the world would be if there were more people who judged books (or people, or websites, or...) by what's inside rather than by the cover. I suspect it would be a lot better. Certainly there would be less senseless bloodshed.

It boggles my mind that someone is proud to be part of the problem.

-- MarkusQ

Re:Ick.

[Jack William Bell]

I'm not certain just how far his tongue was into his cheek when he posted that. I certainly hope that was the case anyway.

OTOH I definately agree with you...

Pot calling kettle black?

[MonTemplar]

Just looked at his site on my work PC (W2K, IE6).

The right hand blog-roll column completely busts out of the lovingly-crafted container with the faux-shadow. Oh, how I chuckled.

As it happens, I'm thinking about a redesign for my website. More on that in a future JE...

MT.

Re:Pot calling kettle black?

[bwa5099]

On the topic of the pot calling the kettle black, I don't need to have a perfectly designed site to be able to tell that another one is ugly. And the superficial comment I made was a serious one. Realistically, people judge a book by its cover first. It's not a problem, it's a fact. /. is ugly, no matter how you look at it. From the left, the right, or behind, it's still as ugly. Sure the content is good, but for being one of the largest tech-news sites, you'd think they could stay up on design technology a