Choosing Colour For Your Website

Colour schemes are the hardest to pick when building your website.

Why?

If your favourite colour is mauve, this may not translate into a website that is eye-appealing to potential customers. Also, you text and content may be hidden behind that colour.

Your customer might leave right away after seeing a grotesque colour scheme, so having the right colours can change the appearance and initial reaction to your website.

However, since there are infinite colour schemes, which ones will best suit you?

When designing a website, not only are you designing functionality and accessibility, you are also designing readability or eye appeal. This is different from websites that use flash to entice the visitor. Flash sites also have the disadvantage of not having the search engines being able to view a website that is entirely made of flash.

The colours should be ones that suit you, however suit the customer more. Reds, blues and orange/salmon and black on white have dramatic impact on how you perceive. For example, red has been used to demonstrate a call to action (for example, ‘buy’ can be placed within a red context because you wish the customer to ‘buy’ your product. You can place headlines in red; however, if you place the wrong headline in red, you won’t have buying customers. Red is a very powerful message marker. Use with caution.

Blue is used to have a calm experience. For example, some yoga and meditation websites will use blue to calm and red to entice their visitors to ‘buy’ their meditation services.

Some other sites have used orange/salmon to great effect. These colours can also entice visitors to find out more about your products and services as well as a combination of black and white text and background.

Traditional black on white background is still very useful. This is the basic colour scheme that we are all used to seeing and will also convey your message. What you can do is incorporate some of the other colours and see how they best suit your website and you business goals.

Colour enhances the images we see. When this is applied to website design it’s important to have your customer in mind. Determine which colour scheme works best for your website and continue to test. Once you’ve found a colour scheme that works, leave it. This will ensure your website business success.

About The Author

Mark Gerrard is the Development Manager of the Freestart Website Builder Platform. See our website builder in action at http://www.freestart.com


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Helping Your Visitors To A Great Website Experience

Your website visitor is typically looking for fresh content and solutions to their problems. If they don’t find the information they’re looking for, they will just look for that information somewhere else.

As a website business owner, your responsibility is to attract the website visitor, provide them with what they’re looking for and in the process if a product or service you offer can help them perform this task easily, then you will also achieve your business goals.

With a huge listing of websites on the Internet, you have to be able to separate yourself from your competition.

How do you accomplish this?

Content is a strong factor. Content refers to the actual words, pictures and other text that you have displayed on your website. For example, if you are a website that sells antiques, you may wish to create daily articles that reference the world of antiques. You can describe to your potential customer what to look for and the relevance of such items as an authenticity documents and getting the potential antique appraised.

Visitors will find this information very useful and so will the search engines. Since you are placing new and fresh content on your website on a daily basis, the search engines and their ‘spiders’ will crawl and re-index your site. This will lead to higher website rankings because you are providing the search engines various means of achieving their revenue stream by attracting paying advertisers who want fresh and new content.

Creating new content doesn’t have to be a chore. You can pace yourself and write one article a day or one article every 2 days. The point is without new content, your website will die a content and visitor starved death.

The actual layout of your website will also attract or detract from visitors using your site and making actual purchases of your products or services. Users want to get in and get out as quickly as possible. However, if you make their buying experience easy and the content rich with useful information the longer they will stick around and have the potential to purchase something from your website business.

Helping your website visitor to have a great website experience doesn’t take much. However, this process does involve work and a willingness to help others. It is through helping your website visitor that your website will create useful experiences and buying customers.

About The Author

Mark Gerrard is the Development Manager of the Freestart Website Builder Platform. See our website builder in action at http://www.freestart.com

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Simple Web Design Steps to Improve Your Website's Readability

Websites that make their customers work to read them are not the best way to get business. Miniscule fonts, text in colours that make it hard to see against the background colour, and lines that are piled on top of each other are problems, but they're easy to correct. Let's jump right in and look at five easy fixes:

Format your text using CSS.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are the way to go - use one style sheet and control how text looks on your entire site. Make a change to the style sheet and your whole site is updated. It makes life a lot simpler

Make the font size big enough to read

Consider your target audience. Even if they are a group of teenage girls looking for new shoes, it's never a good idea to use tiny type. It doesn't have to be enormous, but up to a point, larger type is better. 12-pt Verdana is better than 8-pt Verdana.

Make the text contrast with its background.

The more contrast, the better. Black-on-white or white-on-black are examples of the highest contrast you can get. Use colours if you like, but if you squint at the page and your text basically vanishes, there's not enough contrast.

Give the lines room to breathe.

Don't stack lines on top of each other. Use the line-spacing directive in CSS and give it some space; I'll often set line-spacing to 140% of the height of a typical line.

Break text up into chunks.

No matter how good a writer you are, people don't want to read endless pages of text. Break it up by using headlines that reflect the subject of the paragraph(s) to follow so people can scan down to the parts that really interest them, or use bulleted lists to change the pace of the writing and slow down the scanning.

And finally (not one of the 5 Easy Ways to Improve Legibility but still quite important) check your spelling. Nothing irritates me more on a web page than spelling errors - it simply makes you look like you don't care enough to get it right. Use that ubiquitous spell-check tool.

Making your website's content more legible is easy. It doesn't take a lot of time, mainly common sense. The payoff will be text that's more readable, customers that stick around long enough to get your message, and improved credibility with your visitors.

About The Author

Copyright 2007, Mark Webster

Mark Webster is an experienced web designer, working for a leading advertising agency / web design agency in Manchester, ADZ Media http://www.adzmedia.co.uk. In addition to this, he also owns a web design company offering affordable web design at http://www.fullwebdesign.co.uk and aims to get people to conform to compliant web design standards.


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Website Design Concerns – The Basics

Just when you thought that you had all the aspects of your website covered, a few more concerns crop up. One of the biggest reasons why customers will leave your website is the time it takes to load or the speed of the website.

Intense graphics, too much flashy special effects and your logo design all eat into your website’s load time. As business owner first and a webmaster second, you need to ask yourself these questions:

* What do I want my website to accomplish?
* My website in its current state, does it accomplish what I want?
* Can I limit the amount of graphics used and still broadcast my message?
* How I maintain the viewer friendly design of my website?

1) What Do I Want My Website To Accomplish?

When answering this question go beyond the obvious answer of ‘I want to make money.’ More importantly, ‘How can I give the customers what they want while still achieving my business goals?’

Remember these 4 key points: what are my customers’ problems; what solutions have they sought (or ones that didn’t work); what I will offer to provide this solution and finally; why they should buy from me. When you have successfully answered these questions, get an objective opinion. Why? What you may think are reasons may not be what others see (i.e. your customers).

2) My Website In Its Current State, Does It Accomplish What I Want?

If you are creating a new website, you have the advantage of starting with a clean slate and progressing towards your goal. If you are an existing website owner, you may need to re-evaluate if your website is accomplishing what you originally set as its goals.

The ultimate review is this: Am I attracting enough customers to my website and are they buying my service or product? If you are attracting customers, yet they aren’t buying, you need to review your prices and checkout process. If they proceed to checkout and then balk (click away) again you need to determine why. If the reverse is occurring and you have frequent customers and they are buying, it may be time to see if you can add more products they may be interested in – (either through a newsletter or alerting them on the website). This will allow you to ‘up-sell’ to your customer and provide them will more solutions to their problems.

3) Can I Limit The Amount Of Graphics Used And Still Broadcast My Message?

Limiting the amount of graphics used will help your website load faster and will help deliver your message to the customer quicker. However, just because your website may have a lot of graphics doesn’t mean that it has to load fewer graphics; it may mean that the size of the file may have to be reduced in order to have the products listed show properly. For example, if you are showing ladders on your website, you may group them according to height and to no more than 3 per page.

4) How Can I Maintain The Viewer Friendly Design Of My Website?

When mapping your website allow for the fact that you will expand your website to include more information, products or services. Do not build your website with a limited capacity. You will automatically restrict yourself from expanding and possibly create more headaches down the road when you expand.

Some points to remember:

* Have clear titles
* Include a site map
* Include an ‘About Us’, ‘Contact’ and ‘Privacy’ page where people can see a real address and phone number

When you create your website, keep these questions in mind. Get some objective feedback from someone who gives you their true opinion and doesn’t say things to make you feel good. The reason: your customers don’t know you and will at any opportunity click away from your website if given the chance. You minimise the direct chance of clicking away and maximise the opportunity to provide the customer with what they want and you fulfill your business goals

About The Author

Mark Gerrard is the Development Manager of the Freestart Website Builder Platform. See our website builder in action at http://www.freestart.com

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Discovering Your Website Appeal

When you’re designing your website, you have a look you wish to achieve. This look is usually geared towards the product or service you are providing. For example, a website that wants to sell several products will have images and relevant text (content) to describe the products and their benefits.

A service oriented website typically states the service offered and why this service should be used by the customer and the benefits of the service. The appearance is typically flat (meaning straight forward).

The product and service centric website will both have design elements in common:

* Simple to navigate
* Clear layout
* Site map
* Consistency

When choosing the colours of your website, experimentation will help, however avoid garish text and difficult fonts. Traditionally, Times New Roman, Arial, Garamond, Tahoma and Palatino Linotype have been used for many websites. Times New Roman and Arial function well when your customers have to read long passages of text (such as your sales letter). Garamond and Tahoma are very good for shorter descriptions. However avoid mixing and matching too many fonts with each other. This will create visual disparity between what you wish to say (in your writing) and what your target audience (customer) wants. This will translate in minimal or dismal sales; definitely not what you want for your business!

Also, bear in mind that your customer came to your website in search of information. Help them by making it easy to obtain information about your company, the products or services you provide.

Avoid price lists in service related websites. Why? Because you narrow the opportunity to negotiate. For example, if you have a psychotherapist website and you automatically place £500 for 1 hour session, you’ll have very little customers. However, if you state that you would have to qualify your potential clients (to see if they fit you as well as if they want your services) with a FREE 1 hour consultation then you will most likely convert this individual into a paying customer.

Remember, the visitor to your website wants something. As a business owner, why not make it easier for them to obtain what they want, from you?

About The Author

Mark Gerrard is the Development Manager of the Freestart Website Builder Platform. See our website builder in action at http://www.freestart.com

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Keyword Research – The Foundation For A Profitable Website

Keyword research is the process of determining which keyword phrases
will describe your website’s products and/or services and are
actually used in web searches. It is insight into the needs of your
customers or clients. Bottom line it is finding out what Internet
surfers are actually searching for.

Choosing keywords or keyword phrases can be very confusing for new
site owners. If you don’t have keyword or keyword phrases
optimized on your web site, you will not get the traffic you want and
individuals will not stay on your site, read your information or buy
you service or product.

Keyword research can be broken down into a three step process. The
first step is the discovery phase. In this step you want to focus on
identifying as many keywords or phrases as possible.

Initially you need to sit down and brainstorm a list of
keyword/keyword phrases that address the topic of your web site. Have a
dictionary and thesaurus handy. At this point include every word or
phrase that you can think of.

There are several keyword tools that are available to help you generate a keyword list. Some of these tools are free (www.goodkeywords.com and Google Adwords Tool) while others (www.wordtracker.com) are fee based. With these tools you will be able to generate hundreds of keyword phrases.

The second step in the analyzing phase. This step involves analyzing
the popularity and competition for the keyword phrases. The quickest
way to perform the analysis is to use one of the fee based keyword
tools like Wordtracker.

Wordtracker is able to quickly take your list of keyword phases and
give you the number of searches in the past 30 days and the number of
competitive web sites for each phrase. Wordtracker also supplies a
numerical value called a Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) that helps
determine the competitiveness of a keyword phrase. A keyword phrase
with a high KEI means it is less competitive.

From Wordtracker you are able to export your keyword list along with
the KEI, search and competitive site data. This information can then be
entered into Excel spreadsheets. This will allow you to make
comparisons between various keyword phrases and do away with any
unrelated or undesireable keyword phrases.

The third step is the selection of keyword phrases. From your
analysis phase, you should be able to identify a number of high quality
keyword phases that can accurately describe the qualities of your
website.

In your final selection of keyword phases you need to look for
phrase that have a high level of search activity, while the level of
competitiveness is relatively low. For making your final selection of
15-20 keyword phrases you will want to do a Google search on the
keyword phrases and view the top web sites listed for each phrase. Are
the sites professionally designed? Can you design a web page that can
move up into the top ratings for this keyword phrase?

When starting a new web site it’s highly recommended to target
only one unique keyword phrase per page. With your newly researched
keyword list you can write your content with a balanced use of unique
phrases that will help generate traffic to your web pages.

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It Is Time To Begin Thinking Outside The Desktop

Information is king. It is what drives the Internet. People have
discovered that they can turn to the Internet for answers to questions
and solutions to problems.

Websites are the most common source of these answers. But sometimes
the answers or solutions cannot be found on a website. In those cases
they may have to purchase and download an e-Book. These are often in a
pdf or exe file format that requires the reader to sit in front of
their desktop or laptop computer to read it. If the reader has been
working at a computer all day, they find little pleasure in facing a
computer screen to read an e-Book.

An increasing number of people carry a PDA (Pocket Digital
Assistant) around in their pocket or purse. These handheld size
computers were intended to serve as organizers for their schedules and
contacts. Another purpose for these Pocket PCs or Palms has been
discovered. That is as e-Book readers.

Commuters to work on light rail or BART trains are seen intensely
reading something from the screens of their pocket size computers. In
most cases, they are reading e-Books. They may be carrying dozens of
full size books in their shirt pocket. There has been an explosion of
books digitalized for reading on these devices. Most are either old
classics no longer under copyright or best sellers that may cost 80% of
their printed versions.

There is a void of e-Books in the area of self-help, business,
hobbies, and health available. This is where the InfoGoRound content is
perfect. Rather than try to compete with others who are converting this
content to pdf files for the desktop, the marketplace is wide open for
this content to be made available for the pocket size computers.

How can you convert a RTF file to be read on one of these devices?
First you need to decide which type of pocket size device you want to
aim for. The Pocket PCs come with Microsoft Reader, an excellent eBook
reader. This requires the .lit file format. The Palms can use several
readers, the eReader is excellent and they have their own eBook Studio
that creates their required format.

An excellent converter is the Text Converter from ABC Amber
Conversion software that will convert RTF to .lit, .pdf, html, and
several other files types, even one for the Blackberry. You can read
about it at http:///www.processtext.com/index.html

You will be doing a huge portion of our population a big favor if you convert your content for these pocket size computers.

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Need A Professional Web Designer?… 5 Things To Look For

You have decided to hire a professional to do your web design. The
problem is that not all of them are professional. Some are working with
knowledge that is out of date, and some of them are working out of the
basement that belongs to their parent’s!

What you need to know:

1. Qualifications are worthless. Unless the person has a proper
graphical design background, almost all of the web design training is
learned at a community college part time and not very credible. Unless
the person you are qualifying can explain XHTML and CSS to you and why
they are good for your website, stay clear.

2. A good web designer will have a diverse portfolio and lots of
attractive sites they have built for their customers. They will also be
able to explain to you why they designed the site the way it looks. If
a person does not have a substantial portfolio, get them to do a first
draft design to display their skill to you.

3. Your designer candidate needs to realize that they are building
your website for users. This means all users regardless of technical
ability and which web browser they are using. Amateur web designers
tend to come up with what they think are impressive looking pages while
ignoring the visitors who will come to your site. Ask the prospect
which browsers they will test the web site on? (answer: as many as
possible) What is the purpose of the website? (answer: explain the
point of the site very simply).

4. Many web designers have no idea what to charge for their
services. When you ask, you will get bids form $50 to $5,000. Both of
these are ridiculous as one of them may be from a non English speaking
foreigner and the other a committee that will accomplish little. Look
for an independent individual as opposed to a corporate type person. Be
willing to negotiate the price but never agree to a let them do
whatever it takes to make a good site and pay by the hour!

5. Be very wary of any web designer who tries to sell you a whole
package; domain name, web hosting, etc. Most of these types of
operations have huge flaws in one area or the other. They will either
be web hosting specialists who think designing web pages is easy or
designers who are reselling some cheap hosting package for a huge
profit. It’s best to buy the hosting yourself.

Keep these five points in mind when looking for that perfect web designer.

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What Is A Blog And Why Have One?

A blog is a short-cut name for a web log. It used to be known only
as an online journal where angst-ridden teens vent out their daily
rants and raves. Voyeurism became the fad. No one started to become
“someone” through blogging. No talent
scout needed, no silver spoon in one’s mouth upon birth required.
All you need is a trusty computer, some typing skills, the urge to
write just about anything, and voila! You can create your own blog!

In the beginning it was just students and youngsters that got bitten
by the blogging bug. Now, almost anyone of any age and status can
participate in the blogosphere - the community of bloggers.

But before one decides to jump into the bandwagon of blogging, it is
important to note what one’s purpose is for blogging. Choose from
these varieties of functions that a blog can deliver:

Political Blogging

Putting up a blog for the purpose of getting in touch with people
who have critical information to either share or contend with is one of
the trendiest functions of blogging nowadays.

Not many have been involved with blogging about their daily agenda
yet while lip servicing, or doing community service or any
government-related events compared to the next blog purpose.

Opinionated Blogging

Just like political blogging, these kinds of blogs teeming with the
author/s’ comments backed with hyperlinks is what keep
opinionated blogging thrive. However, opinionated blogging can be
sometimes just become an outlet for personal frustrations or just any
personal blog that does not necessarily delve into pure politics. It
can talk about products or services that one finds either good or bad.
An opinionated blog can also be just the generic blog that details
one’s daily life.

Niche Blogging

These blogs could either be personal or group blogs that target a
certain market. Hobbyists often create these blogs. So, if you are into
badminton or other racket sports, your niche blog will only or usually
only be composed of posts that are related to rackets sports. Niche
blogs are often monetized either through including advertisements or
selling text links. They become feasible as source of income due to the
well-targeted readers that often subscribe to them.

Splogs or spam blogs are the frowned upon versions of niche blogs.
This is when a blog becomes a whole big bunch of uninformative and
keyword-stuffed entries that aim to just trick search engines to throw
traffic their way. This traffic is then tricked to click to
advertisements or buy products from other sites that the blog owner is
affiliated with.

Educational Blogging

This type of blogging has been gaining more and more popularity as
instructors become more and more learned of the benefits of blogging to
their teaching endeavors. Educators who focus on writing skills as
their forte in teaching are fast becoming obsessed with the
user-friendliness of blogs in communicating information to students
while accessing technology. Other teachers make use of blogs to impart
lessons of the day or readings for the day or even schedules of quizzes
and other school-related events. Blogs can be of great help, too if one
prefer to learn through online education.

Blogging for Online Promotion of a Business

Business blogging or corporate blogging is also one of the most
popular functions of putting up a blog. More and more large companies
(those with sales of more than $50 million per year) are starting to
see the importance of blogging for their businesses. Aside from
updating their partners, customers and potential clients about the
important events and evolution of the company, corporate blogging can
also aid promote further a business.

With business blogging, other individual bloggers, who may take
interest in whatever announcements or updates or changes that the
company is undergoing, echo what the corporate blog states. The coveted
informal dialog that any kind of blog accomplishes is what makes
corporate blogging an ideal tool for grassroots online marketing.

There you go! Whether you want a blog to just talk about your day or
to endorse your business, remember to always offer useful or
enlightening content. This is what usually makes any kind of blog
successful. Happy blogging!