Importance of Color in Web DesignWritten by W. L. Wilder
There’s more to websites than just images and text. A website is a marketing tool, representing company, owner, employees and products. Beyond that, it is a personality. A website is a personality? Yes. It portrays a positive or negative symbolism and/or emotion. In a face-to-face meeting our bodies and faces portray unspoken meanings. We smile, gesture, laugh, and become nervous. It’s these little nuances that help us communicate. A website does exactly same thing. The difference is: a website does it with color. Colors themselves contain a cornucopia of meaning. They can make us happy, sad, angry, comfortable, nervous, and even trusting. While it seems simple enough to choose a graphic and then design a site around that graphic, you may unintentionally be presenting a derogatory impression. The colors may contradict content in unintended ways. Colors and their meanings Green and white work well together, but in Japan a white carnation signifies death and a green hat in China means a man’s wife is cheating on him. A green hat with a white carnation in brim wouldn’t be a good choice for a company logo. However, green is easiest color on eye; it has a calming effect which is why it is most used in hospitals. It relaxes patients. Different shades of green have different meanings: yellow-greens are least preferred colors by consumers. Red has been shown to increase blood pressure and heart rate. People working in a red environment work faster, but they also make more mistakes. It increases appetite, restlessness and nervous tension. Creating a site with bright red and bright blue is a very poor idea! Bright red has longest wavelength and bright blue has shortest. When viewing these colors human lens has to adjust to focus, and it tries to focus on both. This tires eyes very quickly and will give viewer a headache. Websites that contain different shades of blue, or a blue and white combination tend to be more popular. Why? Blue represents calm, stability, hope, wisdom and generosity. People inherently trust blue websites faster. Add blue text and people will retain more information from your site. Combine blue, purple, and white and you have nobility. Thankfully you do not see many yellow sites. While yellow can increase concentration, it is hardest on eyes. Paint a room yellow and you will make babies cry and adults lose their temper. Yellow is a very spiritual color and eye catching. Used in small amounts it is very inviting, cheerful and number one attention getter. Forget blinking animations, just use a small, nicely designed yellow graphic. Let’s talk orange for a minute. As a fruit, I love it. As a color, I don’t love it. It always reminds me of Jell-O and that reminds me that EEG of Jell-O is same as human brain. Orange does have its pluses though. It tends to make more expensive products seem affordable and suitable for everyone, almost like a natural sales pitch. Brighter orange is hard on eyes and is not recommended for text or background images. Small amounts of bright orange can help create a “fun and interesting” site. Action and Reaction Color affects how we feel, our perceptions, and our interactions. A visitor has already made a conscious choice to visit your site, now you have to keep his or her interest. You have between 8 to 10 seconds to visually appeal to surfer. Through color you can make a surfer feel welcome, comfortable, relaxed, and trusting. If you take existing graphics on a site and change color you change way site is perceived, thus changing a person’s reaction.
| | Professional Website Do's and Don'ts.Written by Wynn Wilder
Do’s and Don'ts of a Professional WebsiteA professional website is, above all else, professional. What constitutes professional though? This question has been asked by many, and answers are as varied as those asking question. There are at least a hundred or more possible aspects to consider, some consisting of parts of others, such as demographics and content. Each factor has its own affect on how customers perceive a website. Being professional is an attitude portrayed by you, business owner, your business and your website. You don't have luxury of smiling real big, wearing your best suit, and shaking hands with customer. Your site has to do that for you. This brief list of what to do and what not to do when creating a professional website is only beginning, one small step towards success. Do's 1. Know your visitors. Your site should be designed to fit their needs and wants. If you're selling, know demographics of people you're selling to. If you're just providing information, know who you are targeting. Rule of thumb: Know more about your audience than they know about you. 2. Know your product. As strange as that may sound, people know when a site offers products or services that they themselves know little about. If you are letting someone else write content for your site and that someone doesn’t know product, then your customers won't know it either. Anticipate questions from customers and answer them before they are asked. 3. Make your site visually pleasing. Just because bright red and bright blue are your favorite colors doesn't mean that they should be dominant colors in your site. Red and blue are at different ends of spectrum and will give viewers a headache if viewed to long. You want to make viewers feel welcome, comfortable, and that they are able to trust you. 4. Outline concept of site before it is created. Know answers to those golden questions: who, what, when, where, why and how. While these questions apply to your demographics they are also helpful in deciding what information is truly important and what isn't. Pinning down your tacit knowledge is often a challenge, and not all tacit knowledge is valuable. What do you want customers to know and what do customers want to know? 5. Make your prices readily available. Hide your prices and customers will wonder what else you are hiding. Don't wait until after you ask for their credit card information to tell them how much it costs. You don't make sales that way; what you do make is frustrated customers who tell other potential customers to stay away from your site. 6. Keep your site credible. Back up what you say with statistics or links to articles that support your claim. If you have experts in your company, highlight them. Show customer that there are REAL people running business. Update content as often as possible - if updating content isn't possible, add links to news articles and update those links. It is time consuming, but in end it is worth time and effort. 7. Ask for input from people who know nothing about your product/service/business. This is best way to get true feedback. People who know nothing about what you are doing can find smallest error and ask best questions. They can give you a fresh perspective on your site and sometimes your business. They don't know what you know, and they often see what you don't. 8. Use images that portray confidence. You want customer to trust you right? Then show them that you believe enough in yourself and your product that there is no doubt that you are trustworthy. Dress for success. You wouldn't wear snow boots on a hot summer’s day, would you? Then don't let your site wear images that could make you look cheap and untrustworthy. 9. Keep your site translator-friendly. This can sometimes be challenging as we tend to use different terminology than other countries. What we would consider 'normal phrasing' may be considered 'odd' or offensive to someone else. Avoid slang and check your site with a translator. Check to see which words are translated and which ones aren't, then try to figure out why. 10. Be consistent throughout site. Making each page of your site different can be entertaining to teenagers and new internet users, but most of your potential customers aren't new to internet. If a viewer feels as though they're on a different site each time they click a link on your site, they are likely to go to another site. Consistency counts in site design and professionalism, and your customers will expect it.
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