I’m helping a friend set up a website promoting her business. I found a free hosting site that doesn’t have popups, and it has a good variety of template choices. Since there’s no domain name, and it will just be her name on the heading, she doesn’t want that to be huge. So that took care of half the choices.
I found several very tasteful business type templates. But she really likes the black one with the neon purple border.
I don’t mind doing the black one. I’ll just make sure I have plenty of Visine. But black backgrounds make me think the owner is 14, and I’m going to be greeted with multicolored text, animated .gifs and blaring music.
Depends on the business. Tattoo parlor, DJ business, nightclub, sex-related business, magic…that sort of stuff. There’s lots of good-looking sites out there where the business is “dark” and a dark site looks good, and professional.
For anything else…eh, I don’t think so. The only business site my company has ever designed that is black (just the background - text is black on a light bg) was a jazz club.
What is her business? My advice to you both is to go look at other sites in the same business and see how they look. That’s the first thing we tell all our clients.
I love black background websites, so much easier on the eyes than bright white ones.
However, there’s certainly a subtle implication that a black website is casual or unprofessional. I hesitate to use the word unprofessional, since that isn’t quite true. Many very, very high end websites are black. Nike, many music/bands websites, Maxim and Playboy have all had predominantly black backdrops in their websites. Black backgrounds tend to have an informal feel to them. Certainly when done poorly they look more amateurish than a basic white/grey one might, but there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with it.
I’d treat it like any other aspect of presenting your business. If you are in a conservative field or culture, avoid black backdrops, just like you’d avoid a heavily Flash based site, day-glo business cards and sweat pants and Birkenstocks at the office. If the company sells S&M gear or urban marketing feel free to dive in with the black template.
As long as the text isn’t purple too, it wouldn’t matter to me. I just want a site to be readable.
I like darker backgrounds in general because white ones are hard to read (I suffer through it anyway for the SDMB, but it’s one of the few that’s worth it). I’m legally blind without my corrective lenses.
I’ve never felt black backgrounds were more unprofessional. I’m just weird, though.
~Tasha
Bright white backgrounds hurt my eyes a bit. I brought this up on ATMB, but it was quashed. I agree that black can be subject to connotation, why not dark grey?
Is it just me, but is text on a dark background harder to read? I find it much easier to read black text on a white background on a computer screen.
It’s not just you. Dark text on a light background is the easiest on the eyes, which is a happy coincidence for book printing.
Light text on dark backgrounds has a high “burn-in” factor on the eyes; after a few minutes reading a site with that setup, it takes several minutes for the ghost image to dissipate.
is there an issue when people want to print the pages?
sometimes users will have the “print background” settings checked, which means they’ll end up using tons of ink
Yes; for a few reasons:
-It can make them very tiring to read; after reading text on sites with black bacgrounds, I often experience visual disturbances where everything looks like it is overlaid with horizontal bars, like venetian blinds.
-On browsers where backgrounds are disabled, the light-coloured (or white) text will just be invisible.
-There’s something wrong with my graphics card or monitor here at work, and when I go to a site with a black background, it just switches off (I don’t expect this is a very common objection though, but it annoys me enough to avoid them)
It’s very hard for me and my 48 year old eyes to read light text on a dark background. It’s also hard for me to read text printed over images or textures. If the friend is aiming at kids, a black background with a purple border might be just the thing. If she wants adults as customers, though, she might want to save the black and purple for a personal website. I don’t have anything against black and purple…they’re just hard on my eyes when I’m trying to read.
Don’t feel bad. It’s very hard for me and my 28-year-old eyes to read light text on a dark background. Personally, I’d stay away from black backgrounds, especially with bright neon text. When I visit a site like that, my first impression is that it looks unprofessional. These are also usually the sites with bright, blinking graphics and music. Most of the time I won’t stick around to see if I’m wrong. It’s a turn-off.
Blackis fine, if the print is white, everything is too hard to read otherwise, and I leave the site. This is a problem for people with good eye sight, that have less than ideal viewing circumstances. The friend needs to think in the “I want profit and customers.” mode, and get out of the “I can put what I want on the site because it’s mine.” mode.
I will avoid black backgrounds like the plague. Oftentimes I won’t even stop to see what is on the screen. The whole thing looks unprofessional to me.
I learned long ago to switch my browser controls to display black text on white backgrounds by default. If something looks odd, I sometimes will temporarily switch off and reload a page, but for the most part, I never know if anything has a black background. I can’t even remember what the background of the SDMB is. Blue or something, right?
I associate a black background with the ‘darker side of the web’. If you ever visited some hacker type sites, where words like warez are frequently used, you will notice that many of them use a black background.
Also certain color combos on web pages are almost unreadable, so much that I have to highlight the text w/ my mouse to read it.
I’m nearsighted. Have been so since I was a young teen. Not to the point that I need to wear glasses all the time, but I have needed glasses to see anything that is at a distance for nearly thirty years now. When I read anything I can hold right in front of me, make my jewelry, or hang out on the internet, I don’t need glasses for the most part, and leave them off. But…when I have to read white text over a black background, my eyes get tired very quickly. Unless the text is something intensely interesting to me, I will not bother to read it, or will skim it quickly and might miss some important content. If there is a lot of text, I might feel the need to put on my glasses. Not likely to happen.
Purple text over black background? I’ll back out of that site so fast you’ll hardly know I was ever there. Sorry. 
I’ll add my vote to “White text on black background is hard to read.”
Here:
White text on black background (This can cause eye strain for reasons stated above by others)
Black text on white bacground (This can also tax the eyes because it’s like reading while a flashlight is pointed at your eyes.)
and my personal preference:
Black text on light grey background (This lowers the background brightness; a pale color could also be used.)
I don’t agree that white-on-black text is unprofessional by itself, though. A primarily graphic website with not much text, a black background can help the pictures pop. I would prefer a dark grey to a pure black, though.
Thanks for the imput. I’m going to show her this thread. Then I can say " I told you so."
I’m not sure if it’s my monitor - maybe it’s just not doing as well in its old age. Well, it’s either that or my eyes, which also are falling apart a tad with age.
At any rate, I hate hate light text on dark backgrounds. White on black is just readable; anything but white, and it’s almost always unreadable unless I enlarge the text enough for the letter to become two or three pixels wide.