I don't know about the rest of you, but my eyes aren't what they used to be. Whether it's from sitting in front of a monitor for way too many hours a day or from not eating enough carrots when I was a kid, I find many sites hard to read. Perhaps it's because the designers thought they were being cool with their use of colour. Now don't get me wrong - I like colour just as much as the next person. However, there are a number of factors that make reading from screens more difficult than reading from a book. One of them is the use of colour. You'll notice that most of the text on this page is black and the background is white. Good contrast.
When you're designing a site, keep in mind that not everyone has eyes as good (or as bad) as yours. Site visitors are also using a wide variety of monitors and video cards and may not be able to view more than 256 colours. If you want to keep your site performing, make sure that visitors can read what you have to say. It's not rocket science, but you'd be amazed at how many people use really odd colour combinations that are incredibly hard to read. Get the point? ALSO AVOID THE USE OF ALL CAPITAL LETTERS IN YOUR SENTENCES. There are two reasons for this. First, the use of all capital letters is considered to be SHOUTING on the Internet, particularly in e-mail messaging. Second, we read by word pattern recognition. The ups and downs of the small case letters make distinct patterns that allow us to read faster. This is very important as website visitors tend to skim text. Using all capital letters means that there are no letter shapes to help us distinguish what the word is and we have to slow down and concentrate on what the actual letters are. This tires the eyes and makes your site less friendly which ultimately provides a poor user experience and drives away customers. People visit your website for a reason. You can provide people with the best sales copy and the most comprehensive information on a topic compared to any other website on the Internet and it will be useless if people can't read what you've written. Making a site easy to read may not be as cool as using blue text on a black background. But, if you're in business on the Internet, the lack of cool factor should be more than compensated for by the business you gain from people actually being able to read your website. Internet
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