Newbies to web publishing often mess up their sites. They make their content inaccessible due to their wacky layouts, distracting animations and JavaScript, and excessive slang.

This is ESPECIALLY true of the cut ‘n paste code users on Xanga. Lots of tech-savvy people despise Xanga. Some say it’s because of its closed-source, proprietary nature, but I don’t really agree. Xanga itself is okay, but it’s the individual people using Xanga that give it a bad reputation.

When people think they’re making their site layouts kewl, they also cause it to become counterintuitive and counterproductive.

Here’s the list of generally disliked practices for any site–not just Xanga. It’s in order of severity, starting with the worst offense.

1. Text that is (virtually) the same color as the background. Also known as “spoiler text”. If you have to highlight text to read it properly, the user will be very annoyed. Highlighted text also often disrupts embedded images, inverting colors or dithering a dim color in. Also, it makes possibly nice layouts look disgusting because the words are “boxy” and every element on the page is highlighted. Why force your users to CTRL-A/APPLE-A, or worse, triple-click, just so they can read your page?
2. 31337 $P33k, rAnDOm cApS, ALL CAPS, no caps, and rely hard2read chatr slang. C4n U 34$!1y r34d th1$? (Can you easily read this?) hOw bOuT ThIs, iS tHiS cOOl oR wHAt?! Capitalization was designed to help letters to naturally flow together, but rANdoM cAPs breaks up this flow, AND ALL CAPS CAUSES WORDS TO APPEAR IN BLOCKS WHICH ARE HARD TO READ. no caps n hrd2rd slang + carless mispelings will cause most visitors to head for that green left-pointing arrow on their browser.
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