Rogue's Gallery of the Web

James F. Carter, 2007-10-06

The purpose of this page is to document the statement that virtually no professional web designer follows the accompanying web design guidelines. I have picked five each of the home pages of world-class American mathematics departments (our direct peer group), global academic institutions, major (and not-so-major) corporations, and the sites winning the Webby awards for best practices in web design in the last five years. The latter should be an authoritative representation of how professional web designers think web design ought to be done.

Actually, a few sites do follow the guidelines, but the vast majority do not. At the end of the table is a count of conforming sites.

To save disc space and bandwidth, screen shots are compressed as JPEG at quality 30, giving slight compression artifacts and 2.3% (44:1) compression on these easily compressed images.

The big screenshots are taken with a window size of 1450x1020px (almost full screen on a Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop) and the body font set to 28pt, which is 50px on this display. This is how a visually impaired person could make the page more readable. The tiny ones are in a 320x400px window (payload area 320x320px) and the body font is set to 5pt or 9px. This simulates a Palm Treo 650 mobile device. The screenshots are all presented at their intrinsic size (violating our own guidelines which state that they should be magnified or shrunk to fit the client's screen), so the standardly abled client with a standard display can get an idea of what other populations would be seeing.

The screenshots and HTML validation were done on 2007-10-06. Sites do improve with time, and if you follow the links to the pages you may find that more of them have valid HTML, or have user-friendly fonts and layout.