Is your site making your visitors’ eyes bleed?

Today I was surfing around to find potential interviewees for an upcoming episode of my Crafting Voices podcast, when I landed on an artist’s site that actually hurt my eyes. (I’ve blurred out the name of the site to protect the guilty)

Now I suppose that this artist has pretty good work, but I could barely look at it because they had unfortunately designed their site with a bright red background and tiny little pictures…and to make matters worse, the links were in pale lavender. After a minute or two of looking around the site, I just had to leave because of the vast sea of red assaulting my eyes. And my eyes were still watery a few minutes after leaving the site.

Now if I really, really wanted to look at the site, I could have adjusted my monitor…and to be fair the site looked a little less bright on my PC’s monitor…but it was still uncomfortably bright…but how many of your visitors will be willing to adjust their monitors just to look at your site? In most cases they’ll flee to preserve their eyesight just like I did. So when choosing background colors or background images for your web site, remember these tips:

1. Avoid large blocks of very bright colors. Watch your reds, oranges, and particularly vibrant shades of blue or green. If your color palette includes bright colors, make sure that it’s not large expanses of unbroken color, break it up with text and picture to minimize the impact.

2. Avoid large busy patterns for a background. These also hurt the eyes and it’s a nightmare when you add text.

3. Avoid background colors that are too close to the color of the text. Low contrast between the text and the background makes your copy hard to read and strains the eyes. That also goes for active and visited hyperlinks.

4. Try to check the color of your background on different monitors. What looks sunny and perky on your monitor might be blinding on someone else’s

If there are some tips I might have missed, leave a comment and add yours!