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Red, Green and Blue: Why Colors Matter on Your Website

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Red Green Blue2Colors can alter the mood of a person, dictate feelings or even influence a person to purchase a product. One can say that color is a powerful tool when it comes to design.

With the emergence of new technologies and the impact of websites, the power of color can be applied even to web design. Choosing the right color scheme for your website can help in driving traffic and even to influence your readers to take action, especially for profit-oriented websites.

Here are some insights on color and its usage in web design:

 

Light versus dark

A light color scheme is often used by females with personal blogs because it evokes a feeling of lightness and a touch of femininity, especially when pastels are thrown into the mix.

A dark color scheme is not so popular when it comes to blogs because it makes text harder to read, but it has its uses in mainstream websites.

Some official websites by individuals make use of such, usually following the scheme in cover and album art for musicians, or movie posters for films.

 

White or black backgrounds

White backgrounds are generally used all throughout the Internet. It serves as a great base for e-commerce websites because items are easier to view as opposed to choosing such with a dark background.

On the other hand, black backgrounds are often used for websites and forums that are masculine in nature. Most videogame-related websites make use of black backgrounds.

 

Gender generalizations

With regard to gender, it is hard to generalize which color would appeal to each. There is a common notion that women love pink, but there are actually a number of them who hate the color with a passion.

A good way to determine which colors are a hit with each gender are the fashion trends of the season.

What people are wearing can translate to what the colors actually appeal to them.

 

Let’s talk business

For corporate sites, it is best to choose a color or two from the company logo. Some companies even have official color schemes, and that should be used in the company website as well. It adds a touch of professionalism to the website.

In the same way, portfolio sites should choose colors that reflect the personal style of the owner’s projects so that prospective clients can decide early on whether the kind of work would be what he can expect from the designer.

Those with businesses should be very careful with the use of colors, since some people have negative connotations with some shades and they might turn people off. Neutral colors with hints of accents are your best bets.

The color choices that you employ for your website can make or break the purpose of having one.

Make sure that the hues and shades that you choose are in line with the content you want to have on your website, in order to achieve what you want.

Also keep in mind that colors can have so many meanings, not just in social conventions but even psychology-wise, so be careful in adding splashes of colors on your website.

 

Erik Gaandt is a freelance tech writer and SEO enthusiast. He understands the importance of SEO good practices and he enjoys sharing his insights on various marketing blogs. WhoIsHostingThis is a review service that focuses on the performance of various webhosts.

 

 

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How Heat Maps Can Contribute To The Site’s Usability

During the earlier times in the internet era, web designs are pretty much complicated. For this reason, only a few and rich companies are able to get this for their online exposure.
These days, websites are getting easier to create thus, small or even home-based businesses with websites are already a common sight in the online world. This occurrence on the internet can only be credited to the increasing advancements in the internet technology.

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Points To Consider While Designing A User-Friendly Website

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UserFriendlyWebsiteIt is extremely important for contemporary businesses to have a strong online presence.

The sheer volume of prospective customers with access to the web is growing by leaps and bounds over the passage of time, making it practically imperative for companies to build strong and informative websites, to retain contact with clients at all times.

The presence of secure websites is all the more necessary if your firm specializes exclusively in online transactions.

In what follows, you will be provided with a few pointers that can go a long way in making your business website more powerful and effective. Click here to find more informations on this regards.

  • Choose a structured layout – There are several alternative layouts that can be used on web pages. However, it is advisable for you to stick to the most common ones that are seen online. The layout that you select must lend your site an uncluttered, easy-to-navigate feel. A systematically developed website also ensures that visitors can find the information they need quickly and with ease.
  • Selecting the font for web content – While browsing on the web, people tend to be rather impatient in nature. Hence, it is critical for a website to be user-friendly enough to retain the users’ attention for an extended span of time. Choose a font for your site that would be present on the systems of maximum users (Ariel, Times New Roman or Verdana serve fine in this regard). The font size and color should also be chosen appropriately.
  • Presence of animations and flash banners – It is important for your site to have a small loading time. Typically, multimedia flash content takes greater time to load on a server than a plain, text-based web page. Hence, you need to determine the amount and the number of multimedia advertisements that should be present on your site. Always keep in mind that, it is the information content, and not the advertisements, that will drive traffic to your site.
  • Use of pop-up advertisements – Users from all over the world would agree on the fact that websites with many pop-ups are irritating and rather inconvenient. Stay away from the notion that a large number of pop-up ads will actually make your site more interactive in nature. Far from doing so, that can actually drive people away from your site. A single pop-up might work well, along with one pop-under page (if necessary).
  • Putting hyperlinks on your pages – Help your visitors to easily locate the hyperlinks that you place in your webpage content. The conventional practice on this count is to put the text that is to be hyperlinked in blue, and underlining the same. That way, it would stand out from the rest of the content and make people aware of the presence of hyperlinks.
  • Linking to the Home Page – Ideally, each and every page of your website should have a link to return to the home page. This makes your site much easier to navigate (rather than making users use the ‘back’ button far too often).
  • Compressing images –Image files that are too large in size will automatically slow down your site. Thus, you need to compress your pictures to sizes that would be optimal for web users. Fortunately, there are a number of online graphic editors which you can use for this purpose.
  • Content quality – In order to gain in reputation and popularity over the long-run, you need to make sure that the content that is published on your website is of the best quality. The write-ups have to be informative, structured and crisp. Ideally, each of the pages should dwell with discrete topics or issues. Of course, avoiding basic spelling and grammatical errors is of the primary essence.

There are multiple other tips that you should follow while creating your own website. Close adherence to all such web designing guidelines can make your site really popular among users.

 

Contributed by Kenneth Parkar, the official instruction about how to design or develop your website.

 

 

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The Importance of Usability When Building a Website

UsabilityIf you are building a website, whether it will be used to provide information for a particular audience or advertise and/or sell particular products and/or services, or indeed for both of those purposes, then it is crucial that the website is created in a way that makes it useable for many different people.

This means ensuring that the website can be easily accessed through many different devices and web browsers. The importance of usability to a website can often be underestimated, but will be explained further throughout this article.

 

There is a need for speed

It is important, for example, that a website can be loaded quickly through many different devices and web browsers. This is because, should someone find that a website does not load quickly, they are likely to lose patience with that website and instead try loading a different one. This can obviously cost the owner of the slow-loading website valuable hits and/or sales, and so can prove a surprisingly crucial factor in the success of that website. You should particularly consider that the average website user will not wait longer than 6-7 seconds for a page to load; hence, there is little point in having a high quality website if it cannot be loaded sufficiently promptly.

For this reason, you should try your best to avoid having any files, like images, on your website which are large in size and therefore may take a long time to load. While you might be tempted, for example, to use elaborate background images which will make your website look prettier, you need to consider that not everyone who attempts to access your website will have a very fast computer or Internet connection which can help them to load such images quickly. Furthermore, many people who have high speed Internet will expect website pages to load almost instantly; hence, you should endeavour to optimise all of your website files to have the smallest possible size without sacrificing their quality.

 

Keep things simple to make things easy

Furthermore, once visitors do successfully load a website, it is crucial that they are not left confused about what the website has to offer. You should remember that your website’s design should ideally cater equally for both people seeking brief information and people seeking more detailed information, and that any confusion experienced by any of these people could tempt them into abandoning the website to peruse another one. What you actually want to lead these people to do is use your website to quickly find the information that they want and then take a positive action – whether that involves taking up advice detailed on your website or purchasing any products and/or services that your website advertises.

Hence, when developing a website it is crucial to consider how it will be navigated by its visitors. For all visitors, but especially first time visitors, you should endeavour to make navigation straightforward and consistent. Make sure that no part of the website is any further than three clicks away. Though there are many different advanced ways in which you can design a website, there is little point in drawing on many of these if they render the website difficult to use. Ultimately, you would be better off sticking to a simple website design if it makes the website easier to use, as this should also make it more successful.

It is also important to keep the website’s structure simple. The extent to which you achieve this will largely define how easy the website is to navigate, which can make or break its appeal among inexperienced and impatient web surfers. Even if your website has a hundred pages, there are still ways in which you can maintain the simplicity of its structure – for example, through using expandable tree menus that clearly show where in the network of the website’s pages the user currently is and what pages the user has already viewed and clicked through.

 

The importance of uniformity

You should consider that many Internet users have become accustomed to very particular designs in the websites that they visit. Hence, it would be wise to adhere to one of these designs for your own website in order to discourage confusion in its visitors. Staples of many website designs include the logo of the organisation which owns the website in the top left corner of every page, which often incorporates a link back to the website’s home page; a navigation bar in the same part of each page; links in the footer to pages dedicated to the website’s privacy policy and terms of use; and an ‘About us’ section or page which reveals more about the organisation which owns the website.

Furthermore, whatever design is chosen for the website, it should remain consistent throughout all of that website’s pages. This should help to discourage confusion in the website’s visitors and could also extend even to error pages. These pages are the type which typically appear when a broken or invalid link is clicked, and any error pages you create should include information on what may have led to the error. However, bug prevention is always better than cure concerning the usability of a website. Indeed, if visitors to your website routinely experience a significant number of bugs, this is likely to damage your website’s reputation over time.

 

The importance of website usability in a nutshell

What you ultimately want to provide with a website is a pleasant experience for visitors which makes it easy for them to promptly find precisely what they are looking for. This is crucial for the success of your website, as it will help it to attract an increasing number of visitors and, if you are using the website to advertise or sell particular products and/or services, encourage higher sales of those products and/or services. As word of mouth spreads about the high quality of your website, the website’s visitor numbers and hence success should further increase.

 

 

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