Member-only story
Personal Choice in Web Design
What I’m learning as I re-build my website.
I built my first website sometime around 1998. It was hand-coded with HTML and CSS I learned by reading other site’s source code. Yes, I’m that kind of nerd.
That first site, built on Geocities, had a black background, white text, and yellow accents. I guess I favored a nice dark mode before it existed as a system preference.
For the last few weeks, I’ve been rebuilding my website from the inside out. I’ve been curious about other people’s preferences throughout the build process. Typically, I build websites like I write; I focus on what I want to see. This time, though, I was curious about what others thought.
I asked about your light or dark mode preference a few weeks back, and while there was no consensus, the opinions were incredibly strong. One response that stood out (but was also pretty indicative of the others) was this one:
It better be a light mode but you better let me change it, too!
Pretty direct, but I hear you loud and clear.
Last week, I asked Mastodon about the ideal web page font size. The responses came back suggesting using font-size: 100% as the site's base. This, according to the explanations, allows the user to adjust their font size in the…
