Have you ever designed a hideous website?

How a website went from ok to hideous.

[shigamoto]

The strangest thing happened today.. I presented a website to a client of mine (I do some webdesign part-time), they had complained about the colors something I couldn't understand why.

On my laptop the colors were perfectly fine and the site looked ok and clean. Sure it wasn't a masterpiece but it was alright. My laptop screen is really bad so at least I can blame on something.

When I opened the website at my clients I felt a chill down my spine. It looked hideous, the color looked like puke, seriously. I couldn't defend the website so I just agreed with all the critique. So now I'm re-designing the whole thing again. The reason that this happened in the first place was that I was getting sloppy, didn't check on several screens and so on. So this was really a wake-up call and a warning.

Back in the days I usually designed the sites, then didn't look at them for a couple of days, if they failed to look beautiful when I opened them days later I scrapped them. This is something I'm gonna start doing again.

Have any of you had any similar experiences?

[pmkpmk]

With great effort, we relaunched a 400+ pages corporate site in January/February 2004. We were extremely proud. It had a clean, efficient look, and stood out like a peak among the competition. We got good press and even got an award by an influental industry newspaper.

Not even a year later, I was so fed up with it, that I wished we could relaunch it again. Only common sense and available resources have prevented me so far from doing it. Guess we'll see a relaunch towards the end of this year.

[kaled]

My laptop (which I use as my main PC) tends to render yellows with a slightly red hue. I test with CRT too but I reckon that unless you stick to white text against dark colors or black text against light colors, you will always be able to find a monitor that makes your site look yucky.

My Nephew tends to have the brightness very high because of the games he plays. To me, everything looks yucky on his monitor but he's used to it.

Kaled.

[ncw164x]

Yeah in my early days I would only design for IE using the colours and size what looked OK on my screen, like you say its an eye opener when you see your latest masterpiece totally different on another screen or browser.

Then for testing I used to use an earlier version of Netscape (4.7) what would trash the layout if you had any bad code so that was a big step forward making a site look good in a Netscape browser

Now you can go to a few sites and check your layout using different browsers and screen sizes which makes it so much easier