Impact of Colors in Web Designing

What follows is a guest post from the folks over at Plaveb.com on the importance of choosing the right colors for your site.  If you aren’t thinking about this sort of thing, you should be paying someone who is.

So you have to set up a good grouping of graphics and content on your website, but have you ever thought about the colors? If not, then you must, because colors are as vital part of your website as the graphics or content. The colors you select for your website design creates a lot of disparity. Being conscious that a smattering of colors can lead to an emotional reaction is the key to choose right colors for a website. Knowing what colors have a calming result and which cause feelings of anticipation can choose color scheme very easily. Colors can also be used to make difference and awareness to a design. Colors can direct users to definite parts of a webpage.

Color perception changes from one person to another. Color perception problems are more wide spread than people think, and have more causes and variations.

Colors have a deep affect on the moods of people. There are few colors that have certain effect on a person and summon particular emotions in them and as we know, emotions can be very hazardous to business. Let us see how colors effect the emotions of people through website:

  • Black is related with power, sophistication, modification, riches and mystery. In designing for the website, it can be used successfully with bolder colors to generate good contrast.
  • White is related with clean, simple, calm and purity. White color is used on websites a lot; it can communicate a sense of style and suggests that the content of website is sturdy enough to stand alone without any strong visual aid.
  • With intensions to lust, anger, fire and power – the color Red, to be used carefully, as it can be a great way to direct the user’s concentration to a certain area.
  • Related with color Blue, gives feeling of cold, royalty, stillness and air, blue is the best-used color for corporate websites. It generates a very different reaction to color Red.
  • Green represents nature, environment, peace and luck. Green is a successful color to use for a soothing consequence.
  • Envoy of joy, happiness, warning and energy, the color Yellow has a comparable affect to Red, although it is not as popular. Yellow can be used to highlight areas of a website. However, if it’s used too much, it can be an irresistible.
  • Inspiring up feelings of style, novelty, fashion and modification, the color Grey is frequently used on places that cover fashion, design and tech.
  • Purple is an amalgamation of blue and red. It does have the highlights of red, but has more bold properties than blue. It mixes up the images of royalty, faith and luxury. However, it isn’t regularly used color in designing websites.
  • Brown, mainly the lighter end can be very calming. Beige is also a popular color in web design as it gives an earthy and tranquil feeling. It also means tradition, poverty and Earth.
  • White is a great color to utilize on a website’s background to create a sagacity of space and modernism.

Knowing about what colors symbolize and their subconscious power can be of great advantage when designing websites. Knowing about the target audience, designers can choose colors considerately which connect to the end user thus making the website look eye-catching and tempting.

E-commerce websites can be amended by directing the user in the direction of the purchase button by drawing attention and building contrast.

About Author

Author is working with Plaveb Corporation.

Author has vast experience in web design and has good knowledge in choosing colors for website. He has more than 5 years of experience in web designing.

Frustrations Creating Video Tutorials

Okay, so for this new ebook I want to create video tutorials as part of an upsell package.

My general philosophy on upsell packages is that they should be unique content that makes using the original product much easier for the customer. So those customers that are willing to pay for the upsell package get an easier experience than those who don’t. For my ebook, video tutorials made a lot of sense.

Unfortunately, the freely available products for creating video tutorials fall just a bit short of being as convenient as they could be. My biggest problem is that I’m often demonstrating using a variety of applications, which require dynamically zooming in to show detail. The paid products will do that, but the free ones don’t, at least not so that I can work with them.

Another problem is me…I’m a perfectionist, and it’s nearly impossible to get through even a short video segment without making some sort of mistake. I know that I need to move on and get over it, but I keep wanting to redo the video to fix the mistake (and of course I’ll make a different mistake).

Obviously my talents don’t run to creating videos! I’ll keep at it, though, and get them done.

Advisory Panel Member To Speak At National Conference

Connie, one of the most active members at The Advisory Panel, is scheduled to speak online as part of the Invisible Illness Awareness Week. An “invisible” illness is one that isn’t immediately obvious to someone looking at you…chronic pain, for example.

As a reasonably healthy adult geek, I knew intellectually the opportunities that the Internet provided for people who couldn’t work otherwise. But I didn’t really appreciate how much opportunity there was until I started the Advisory Panel and met Connie (she writes Brain Foggles, along with other blogs). I get migraines, and moan and complain when they’re bad, and pretty much am laid up for the duration. But I cannot imagine coping with what Connie copes with every day, and still being cheerful and energetic, and earning her income online to boot.

I applaud the people who are blogging about invisible illness, and the folks at Rest Ministries who are sponsoring this conference.

If you have a chronic condition, or know someone who has, head on over to one of the links above.

A Lesson Learned From Freshmen

As the fall semester starts here, I’ve been busy preparing syllabi, lecture notes, etc. So I haven’t had much time for my online projects, although I did manage to finish another ebook that I’ll launch sometime in September.

I wanted to talk a bit about the biggest lesson I’ve learned from watching freshmen as they come into college for the first time, and how that lesson applies to newcomers to online marketing.

College Is Hard!

Most of the freshmen find college a challenge. Not necessarily the class material, but the entire experience. Being away from home, entirely responsible for your own actions, answerable to nobody.

A small percentage of them will self-destruct that first year. They’ll decide to ditch class and not do their work, because it’s their choice. Nobody is hounding them to be responsible, it’s up to them. If they’re lucky, they’ll come out of it and start making good decisions. If they’re not, they’ll drop out of college entirely.

When you first start working online, you’re in a similar position. You’ve worked for other people (and probably still do), and in your day job have all sorts of checks and balances to make sure you do what you’re supposed to do.

Online, though, it’s all you. Nobody is going to punish you if you watch a movie instead of working on a mini-site. Nobody is going to yell at you if you knock off an hour early instead of finishing that ebook.

Yet that sort of freedom is an illusion. If you don’t put in the time and the work, you won’t succeed. If you aren’t motivated to start, the chances are good that your motivation will get less and less as time goes by.

You’ll have to be your own boss and force yourself to do the work, to put in the time.

Or you could always drop out, and head back to the day job for good.

It’s your decision.

Online Time Management

When you’re working online time management becomes an important part of what you do.

After all, we all know how easy it is to become distracted by various notifications coming into our email. Bloggers usually get emails when someone leaves a comment, or a comment needs to be moderated. If you run a forum, you probably get notified when a new member registers. If you participate in forums, you have tons of notifications from threads you’ve participated in, telling you that someone has added a new post to the thread. And then there are the tons of emails you get out of the blue, or from lists you’ve subscribed to, that all want your attention.

This has become a big thing lately, and lots of people will offer you advice and coaching, generally for a fee.

But the key to managing your time online is easy: Don’t get distracted!

Working online, you probably have your email up constantly when you’re on the computer. It may even be one of those programs that plays a chime when you get new mail. New emails practically beg to be processed immediately. My first thought, when I check to see who the email is from, is, “I can reply to that in just a couple of minutes, why put it off?” Over time I’ve gotten a reputation for being prompt to reply to emails.

Those two minutes add up, though, when you count all the emails you need to reply to over the course of a day. More damaging by far, though, is that while you can answer that email in just two minutes, it will take you more than two minutes to get back into the mind-set of what you were doing before you took your email break. It’s like having the answer to a question on the tip of your tongue, and then having someone ask you an entirely unrelated question. It takes me days sometimes to remember what I was going to say.

Online time management is all about focus. You don’t have to schedule your day, but if you sit down and feel like working on a web site you are creating, block off an hour or two to do nothing but that. Close your email program, and don’t check email until your hour or two is finished (breathe, it’ll be okay…everyone can wait for a reply that long, or they would have called you instead). Don’t open up a web browser to pop onto another web site, unless it’s research you need to do for the one you’re creating.

After the hour or two you’ve allocated, take a break. The more time you spend on a particular task, the less you get done. You could process your emails during your break, but you’ll get more out of getting away from the computer and doing something physical. Get your blood moving and your heart pumping, even if you just take a walk around your neighborhood. You’ll be refreshed then, to sit down and spend another hour or two doing something online.

Other distractions are harder to cope with, such as kids and pets. But try to isolate yourself for the hour or two that you’ll be working, so you can focus and concentrate. You’ll get far more done that way.

We’ve become so used to reacting to online events as soon as they happen that it might take you a while to get comfortable with choosing when to process emails, post forum replies, etc. But the result in terms of productivity is well worth it!

How To Find A Programmer

So you have an idea for a really great service to fill a need online. How do you find a programmer to make your vision a reality?

I’m assuming that you’re either not a programmer yourself, or you don’t feel that programming the service yourself is the best use of your time.

You want to find a programmer who is going to be reliable, skilled, who won’t charge you an arm and a leg, and who (ideally) would become a long-term partner in your projects. Getting all of that in a single person is quite the task!

One option is to go to a web site designed to help you find freelance programmers. Elance is one of them, RentACoder is another.

My personal experience with sites like that haven’t been great. I’ve had a project accepted, and then later told that they wouldn’t be able to complete it after all. I’ve had bids given, and then later found them trying to increase the amount they get by nitpicking the project requirements.

But, other people have had better results, and some have even found their long-term partners on such sites, so your mileage may vary.

If you live in a college town, you might check with the computer science department of the college to see if there are any students interested in taking on your project. In any CS department there is always at least one student who is a whiz with web programming, and could probably knock out your project in a short time. Being a student, they often won’t charge you what you’d pay a professional to do the same job.

Another option is to hook up online with a programmer who is looking to make money online, but lacks some of the skills you have. A true partnership benefits both of you, and makes it far more likely that you’ll both see your projects through to completion.

If you already work with a good programmer, how did you come across them?

The Importance of Focus

I’ve written before about the importance of focusing on a limited number of projects, rather than diluting your efforts across too many of them.

I’m probably at the point where I need to focus a bit myself, so I figured I’d revisit the idea. When you find yourself with too little time to make much progress on the projects you have, it’s time to evaluate if you want to cut some of them loose. I plan on doing this by writing down a list of all the projects I have going, and estimating how important each is to me, and how much time each takes.

Then in some way I’ll decide which ones to cut loose. Or not, maybe I’ll feel better for just having gone through the exercise.

This comes at a time when I have at least two new projects in mind, too. While I could probably keep all my current projects going indefinitely, there’s no time to add anything new.

I’ll cut this post short tonight, since I’m not entirely sure it’s making much sense (I have a head cold that kicked off today). When I’ve gone through the process of figuring out which projects to cut, I’ll do a post on how it all went.

When A Great Deal Isn’t So Great

I was over at the Site5 web hosting site earlier today, and saw their latest special. It gives you way more disk space and bandwidth than you could ever really use, for $3.50 a month.

It seems like this always happens in web hosting. You sign up with a host under a really great deal, and pretty soon they’re making the deal even better. But not for you, because you signed up under the old plan. That’s just the way web hosting goes.

When I see the $3.50 a month for Site5 hosting, I start to think about getting a second hosting account. They’re offering unlimited websites, so you could easily run all your sites off the one hosting account. I don’t particularly need a second account, I haven’t outgrown the one I have now, but I’m a sucker for great deals.

So I start through the order process to see more of the details. I get to the part where it talks about pricing, and I see that the $3.50 a month price is only available if you prepay for 10 years. Let’s be realistic here…10 years is practically an eternity in web hosting terms. Site5 may not still be around, or I may not still be around, or I may decide to go live on a tropical island without Internet access.

I can’t imagine any good reason for paying for 10 years of web hosting. I’ll prepay for two years to get a better monthly rate, but 10 years is just ridiculous. So I look to see what the rate is for two years, and it’s $6.95 a month. That’s still a good deal, but is double the “special” price. Special pricing is fine, but it’s a bit dishonest to make it available only for a length of time most people wouldn’t use.

I’m still extremely happy with my own Site5 hosting, and don’t have any plans to switch. But I’ll make sure to read the fine print on any web hosting offers that seem too good to be true!

The Advisory Panel On The Move

To a new domain name, that is.

I’d originally hosted The Advisory Panel on a subdomain of this blog, because it was an easy and inexpensive way to host it. I figured I’d see what happened with the forum, and move it to its own domain name later.

Well, later came, and I just recently completed the move. It was a bit of a hassle, which reminded me I should have just started with its own domain name. After all, a domain name is only $9 these days, less if you use a coupon code.

One of the hassles that cropped up was the need to copy the actual forum files from one directory on my server to another. Now, I’m technical enough that I was able to log into the shell and use a single command to copy the entire directory structure to the right place. Lacking that knowledge, though, this would have been a pain.

After the copy, various config files had to be updated with the new location. There weren’t too many of these, because most of the forum doesn’t care about the actual directory it lives in. But it’s a pain to have to go back and touch these config files a second time, when you’ve already done it once setting up the forum.

Switching over to the new domain name was a bigger pain. There are numerous settings in vbulletin that use the domain name, and I had to track down each and every one of them and change it from ap.onlineopportunity.org to advisory-panel.org. I would only know that I missed one of them when I went to the forum and, for example, didn’t see the images of smilies I should have seen when composing a post.

Oh, and a note for anyone who tries to move a forum to a different domain…clear your browser’s cache after the move. I actually saw the smilies even though they weren’t really there because of them being in my browser’s cache. It was only when I logged in from a different computer that I realized something was wrong.

I still have a mildly annoying problem that I haven’t been able to figure out yet, involving the site navigation menu. It worked fine before the move to the new domain name, and doesn’t quite work right now.

So my advice for anyone who is thinking about starting a forum is to break down and spend the $9 to give the forum its own domain name from the very start. It’s far less hassle than trying to move it later!

If you’ve tried to get to The Advisory Panel lately through a bookmark into the forum itself, you’ll have to update those bookmarks. The old main address will automatically forward you to the new address, but no deep links to the old address will work.

This Week At The Advisory Panel

A quick highlight of some of the goings on at The Advisory Panel this week.

In the Site Critiques section, we pick a blog each week and do some critiques of it in various areas, such as the adherence to the niche, the quality of the content, the way it’s monetized, etc. We’re just starting talking about John Chow dot com today, so head on over and chime in with your opinions.

Niche selection is ongoing in the sponsored blog. That’s a blog written by a group of member volunteers. I pay for the blog’s hosting and provide the technical support, and the volunteers share in the proceeds from the blog. This is all happening in one of the private sections of the forum, available to members only.

In the Shameless Self Promotion section, we’ve heard recently from Rosa, who won the 2007 People’s Media Award, and from Lori, who will be having a guest post published in a very high profile blog. Click through to read the details and congratulate both of them.

I’m also looking for PPC experts to run the advertising exercises. Those are the ones where members brainstorm unique ways to market a particular product, and we then run PPC campaigns to test out the ideas. Profits are shared among all the participants. If you regularly run profitable PPC campaigns, and are a mentoring sort of person, contact me for more details on getting involved.

Those are some of the highlights. Feel free to click through and read the public sections. When you register and confirm your email, you’ll get access to the private sections as well.

Click here for the Advisory Panel.