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.