Major relaunches and complete design overhauls are often unnecessary. Sometimes, the ugliest sites can be vastly improved with subtle changes to the CSS and/or color scheme. Want proof? Take Robert Scoble’s blog. Man, it’s ugly. I realize he doesn’t like pretty sites and prefers anti-marketing design, but come on, it’s terrible. The biggest problem is the font. If you’re going to use a serif font, at least have the decency to use Georgia. That said, most people agree that a sans-serif font is easier to read and generally looks better. To fix this problem takes one line of code in the CSS:
* {font-family: arial, verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;}
And I’d probably add another line to add more of a break after the headers:
h3 {margin-bottom: .5em; font-size: 140%;}
That was pretty simple. And now it reads a lot easier. Check it out:

Cssized Scoble Blog

Technorati tags:


Written by

Fred Simmons

As a Managing Partner and the Director of User Experience at Gulo, Fred enjoys making website interactions more natural and improving UX design. Outside of work, Fred enjoys golf, BBQ, craft beer, movies where the bad guy wins, comma-separated lists, and talking about himself in the third person.