Text and Legibility
Let's talk about text. In my very humble opinion (lol), text is the most important part of a website. If I can't read what you spent hours (or minutes, for some of you) writing, then you have not only wasted your time, but mine. The biggest issues I've come across when it comes to text and legibility is the abuse of line-height, letter spacing, lack of contrast and of course, text size.
I bring examples! Now, a little note before I explain what's wrong with each and every one of these. Some people might argue that these aren't that hard to read, or that adjusting the text size and/or brightness in their monitors would "fix" the problem, but that's not the point here, people. The point is that as a visitor, you shouldn't have to do that. A visitor shouldn't have to go out of his/her way to be able to read your website. That sort of defeats the entire purpose. Alright, now we can continue.
Raping Line-height and Letter-Spacing
This isn't so hard to read. At first. The problem with line-height and letter-spacing is that your eyes have to adjust. While trying to read this blog my eyes kept skipping over to the next line, and I got lost a few times. That, and the sharp white against the dark background made reading this entry very unpleasant for me. Take a look at the "title" bar. Light lavender on white? Not exactly what I would call a good color combination for reading. After reading the light text on the dark background, my eyes had to adjust in order to click the Comment link.
Again, the words seem to blur together. I just don't understand the appeal of squishing text together. It doesn't look attractive at all -- just cluttered.
This entry seems okay. It's not so hard to read (except for the ridiculously small font size) but then I noticed the blog title. This is the worst case of line-height, in my opinion. When the words don't even look like words, you know there's a problem. This line-spacing is not something I'd recommend, mostly because it looks like every sentence is a new paragraph. And actually making new paragraphs is a feat. It would end up looking like you hit your enter button five times to be able to distinguish each new paragraph, and that doesn't look very nice.
Lack of Color Comprehension 101
I won't provide a lot of examples as far as colors are concerned, because I think everyone knows what I mean. I talk a little bit about colors in an article I wrote ages ago, Creating a Layout. The ideas are the same.
Direct your eyes to the left sidebar, where the navy blue bolded words clash against the red patterned background. Then slide on over to the black text on the blue pattern and try very hard not to ram something hard into your eyeballs. WHAT POSSESSES ONE TO USE PATTERNED BACKGROUNDS EVERYWHERE AND THEN SLAP TEXT ONTO IT?! JUST WHAT. ARE. YOU. THINKING.
Abuse of Font Size/Style/Color
Might as well talk about these all at once, because usually people committ all three crimes at once.
I don't know about anyone else, but whenever I see font bolded by default, I always think somewhere along the line someone forgot to close their bold tag. Bold is there to accentuate. To me, bolding is there to capture my attention, and make something feel and look important. Almost like exclamation marks. It is not to be used as a default. I guarantee your blog isn't so important that you must use bold to force! me! to! read! what! you're! writing!
Those are the major issues I've noticed recently (and that don't seem to go away).