This totally depends on the group you are trying to reach, but I don't think many successful companies use this kind of design. It smacks of no customer empathy and exclusion right off the bat, and I wonder if the company using said design is so self-centered that they would lack empathy when dealing with me. My dislike is probably a bit extreme and extends into unfounded pop psychology, but that shows how much light text bothers me. I use foundation and the first thing I do is change the font-colors. Bootstrap doesn't appear to be so bad with this. I'm also the extreme user that doesn't allow third-party fonts on my browser, so take my opinion here with a large grain of salt.

I'm rocking the low-res. I sort of prefer it this way, tbh. High res tends to tire my eyes.

I have no eye for design either. Everything I do is browser default. Once I add in any other color, it goes downhill from there.

I looked at a few design books, but they all suck from what I've seen. They assume you don't even know what HTML is to start.

This is kind of interesting. Just about every designer site I've seen has a few dogs in it. When I was researching web builders at a prior job, I would often pick out their worst thing and ask about it. It opened up some interesting conversations. It is obvious that this was a customer refusing anything other design. I found it fascinating how nuanced most designers were about dealing with the customer. It was also interesting how ashamed they were of the designs.

As for the legality, I was aware of that when I wrote it, which is why I mentioned that it may be premature.

I think its an interesting idea. You appear to be someone of high integrity and it is nice to see someone trying to hit a target that isn't slapping together a WP site and sitting on it for 6 months before they finally diddle a few lines of CSS.

Dave,

I think most ubuntu servers have the versions locked based on the build you have.

For example if you use 12.04 LTS then if you run apt-get to install something 18 months ago and 18 months from now you will get the same version. I think people deploy using the versions that ship with the OS because it's considered stable.

However if you want to update that, it's just a matter of adding in a more up to date PPA and you're good to go.

I don't use emacs but this guy:
https://launchpad.net/~cassou/+archive/emacs

He has 24.3.

theres an annoying effect when you go from home to the other pages because the browser adds in a scrollbar, pushing the menu items to the left 5px or so.

this will fix it by forcing the scrollbar to show up even if its not needed,

Thanks, fixed.

I appreciate the feedback about the text color. I guess the legit question is, how low res/low light is your screen in reality, and how common is this amongst people who would be visiting my site? My site won't even load on IE8 (it's angularjs/lots of css3 and I didn't bother trying to make it IE8 compatible). Did anyone else notice this? I'd imagine most everyone here is probably on a newish computer, so maybe it wouldn't be a good representation of the target audience. I do think the text could be a slight bit bigger on the info pages.

I want be making projects for start ups/people with modern browsers, most of which would have computers that can show the colors no problem? My girlfriend said she had no problem viewing it on a macbook air (which always seemed super low res to me). I'm not super interested in ever building a site that's i.e. 8 compatible again, and would really prefer to build stuff for modern browsers/hardware.

re: having a legit site - We're killing a little time waiting for a few of these projects to get finalized... so it makes sense to try and have a legit website that you can point people to. Some cookie cutter site is basically useless IMO, and kind of a slap in the face to people you are trying to land as clients.

perfectly acceptable position for a site like this imo.

This is what it looks like on my computer. Not sure how this screen shot will look on high-res.



Of course, that may be more indicative of how bad my eyes are. If it matters, I am currently in ambient sunlight with the curtains drawn. The text is more visible.

Here is the form:



Now that the image is cropped and centered, I can see the edges of the form and "Send," but barely. However, I do not look at my screens straight on since I'm on a notebook. When the screen is at its normal position, everything is invisible.

The res is set at 1366 x 768. I'm not sure what the color settings are. I never bothered to change the factory settings, but it is set at max resolution.

The light colored text on assembly.io is almost invisible on my monitors, including a new, fairly well calibrated IPS 27". It's actually best on an old 20" 1600x1200 with terrible color accuracy. "SEND" is the worst offender. The font is mostly 1 pixel, and the colors are 197, 219, 235 - I don't think this is nearly enough contrast from a 3x255 background. The HOME, ABOUT etc at least go as low as 168, although the're still a little tough to see. If I bump CTRL+Scroll up to 150%, (makes everything 2 pixels) it becomes OK.

Depending what you're after, Amazon has an amazing product API available: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEComme...ntro_AAWS.html

I have an S-IPS panel and the light text is really blended in for me too. It looks like it's being set to 20% opacity compared to most sites. The privacy policy link on the bottom looks like it's about a thousand times more opaque compared to the links on top.

W3C has a ton of articles on web accessibility standards. http://www.w3.org/standards/webdesign/accessibility

I have a lot of thoughts about attaining the desired customer, but the only points that are relevant here are that you are working B2B and it is very hard to predict what the business you are building for wants and needs. I totally get it if your home site doesn't work on IE8, but this may not fly well when a customer has some significant N% of their users are on older browsers. I'm not entirely sure what company has a customer base that strictly owns Apple-class high-res and has great eyesight.

Maybe as an experiment, call a bunch of firms and pretend to be a customer looking for a website. Ask about the terrible stuff and the good stuff. Clients truly are fickle.

I think that one part you will run into problems is that you seem to be marketing to startup companies with no technical foundation, which sounds kind of strange, but then again, I don't know much about this market whereas you appear to know more about it than I do.

Despite my snark about using CMS programming. I've seen some highly impressive sites created with the Big 3 CMS. This company in particular creates top-notch product: http://www.ciplex.com/. It appears they recently redid their site. They used to have a gallery of stuff that I would have thought was 100% impossible with a CMS and they have / had an impressive client roster. Very expensive and very difficult to get a job with.

Looks like they aren't too detail oriented, first site of theirs I looked at had this: http://247jets.com/faq/

agree, if those are the examples of great work being done with a CMS, i feel no need to reconsider my disdain for them.

My company does website strategy/design/development and we primarily use Drupal, and although we work with enterprise type clients and budgets, we did speak to someone recently who decided to go with a company that has a specific focus on building MVPs for start-ups.

There is great work being done using a CMS (although I hate that term, especially when using open source, I think of it more as a web platform).

That link from daveT is totally LOL. These guys are actual industry leaders: www.lullabot.com

I gave up on that page after five seconds of loading on the iPad and it still wasn't pulling itself together. Is it just me or does any website the tries to be too responsive completely suck on the iPad?

It just seems like overall people still aren't great at responsive.

hi hoping for some help, googled it everywhere but cant find a logical explanation

i have a 3200x1800 laptop but when i use windowspy, it only shows as 1600x900.

If i then plug a monitor into my laptop which is 1920x1080, windowspy shows laptop as 1600x900 and as soon as you hover 1 pixel over to the monitor, it shows 3201x1080 (so its missing 1600x900 from windowspy, obviously can just x by 2 but stilll). Trying to do some work in ahk using coordinates which is ****ing everything over

So they get the blame for the customer not filling out their own FAQ?

Eh, maybe that company went downhill. I will say that they are in the top 5 web dev companies in LA. Yes, I did look at about 50 of them, but that was 2 years ago, so perhaps the rankings changed a little bit, but from what little recent research I've done, I would say that is unlikely.

Stupid question: Is there some legal obligation to create an accessible website (I should know the answer to this question)? I get that in the real world, the amount of retina MBPs that stumble on a site are relatively low compared to old pieces of crap. People do have bad eye site, and monitors come in different shapes and colors. I'm not trying to ignore this market, I just didn't realize it looked so different on a different set of monitors. I appreciate you bringing the color thing to my attention, and I passed along the feedback to my designer friend. We're all always learning.

I guess what I'm looking for is people that have ideas for what my cofounders and I would agree are fun to make. Cool design, cool user experience. For me, all I really want is to 1) work with people I enjoy 2) have a variety of projects to work on 3) control my own schedule, 4) not spend 100% of my work day coding. In this respect, I'm not even targeting companies that need stuff build for a super broad audience that includes i.e. 8.

Making good money is not even on my radar. I think if I do a good job I'll eventually make more money than I would at a regular job, but I think that'll largely be offset by not making a lot of money this year. I need to make sure we can do a good job for a number of clients, boosting both frequency of work, and what we can ask for in compensation. Of course, if I pay most of the money we make to my coworkers, I will gain equity off that, which is potentially good in the long run.

Yes. If you are going to put a web site down as a reference you could make a call and make sure the owners don't **** it up.

Nchabazam,

How are you getting clients? Or how do you plan to get new clients?

Have a few mid sized projects potentially lined up (obviously need some contracts). Generally it'll just be networking and referrals. Eventually I'd like to hire a biz dev guy.

I have no legal obligation to yield to jaywalkers.

I think others know the answer to this question, but I think there is some legal mumbo jumbo when you are dealing with government agencies, but I honestly don't know.

If you look at the rest of the site, it is clear that it is still under construction. There are pages of missing pictures and information. I agree that it is premature and not ready for a featured position on their site.

Technically if you want to be "HTML5 compliant" your site should be accessible.

Is that your real bandwidth? I'm officially jealous.