Website Colors That Turn Off Your Customers
Using too many colors or the wrong combination of colors could alienate or turn off customers completely. Out of any form of non-verbal communication, color is the quickest way to communicate a message and meaning. Many studies have been done on the psychology of color and the subconscious emotions that they create. Studies have shown that color can help improve recall, comprehension, and understanding by 75%. In fact, color accelerates the ability to learn by 20% by keeping readers focused and improving retention.
Choose Colors with Care.
Marketers spend oodles of time and money determining the colors to best market their product: the colors that will prove the highest amount of return on investment. You may want to hire a professional web designer to help you. Make sure the web designer you hire is not just a programmer, but also a graphic designer and/or marketer. After all, the reason why 99% of all websites fail is because it was created by a technician, rather than a marketing expert.
So, What Colors are Best for Your Website?
That is hard to say. Again, you may want to hire a professional to help you. However, the following tips will help you understand the underlying meaning behind color so you may be guided to make the right choice. Keep in mind that depending on its value or intensity, one color can give very different emotions.
Red - Stimulating. Exciting. Energizing. Appetizing. When you eye sees red, chemical responses in your body cause your blood pressure, pulse rate, and adrenaline to increase. Fire engine red is more energetic than a more traditional burgundy.
Pink - Happy. Romantic. Spirited. Youthful. Best used for less expensive and trendy products. Vibrant pinks are common in the cosmetic industry. Bubble gum pink can be considered immature, but fuchsia or magenta are considered more sophisticated.
Orange - Friendly. Adventurous. Energizing. Inviting. Of all the colors, orange is the hottest. Similar to red’s arousing effect, orange is often associated with bright sunsets or fall foliage. Orange contains the drama of red with the cheeriness of yellow. Neon orange tends to be load and is the most disliked color, but a more tempered vivid orange is highly effective for point-of-purchase graphics and specials.
Yellow - Warm. Sunny. Cheerful. Vibrant. Yellow is equivalent to enlightenment and imagination. This color is especially effective for food service industries because of the -association to bananas, custards and lemons. Pale yellow is an excellent choice for point-of-purchase materials (materials at the cash register or reception area) because the eye sees the highly reflective yellow before it notices any other color.
Brown - Rich. Sheltering. Durable. Sensible. Brown is an earth tone and is related to the earth’s nurturing qualities and stability. Generally speaking, brown provokes a positive response, but the wrong shade could lead to customers relating it to dirty, which could be detrimental for a product in the fashion industry, for example. Brown works well with food products since customers also relate it to root beer, coffee and chocolate.
Blue - Cool. Trusting. Serene. Consistent. Similar to the earthy color brown, blue is related to the sky and water, both dependable constants in our lives. Blue is an ideal color for websites, especially e-commerce websites. Many banks and financial institutions use blue in their marketing because it makes customers feel more trusting. Blue also can generate a cold, distant, corporate feeling, the opposite of generating a personal relationship with the customer.
Green - Refreshing. Healing. Fresh. Soothing. Green offers the most variety of choices out of all the colors of the rainbow. Green works well for personal hygiene or beauty products because of its soothing and flattering tones. Most people link green to nature; they think of foliage or grass. Mint green is seen as fresh while bright greens are associated with grass. Emerald greens are elegant and deep greens are linked to money and prestige. Green is also combined nicely with many other colors and can also work as a neutral.
Purple - Elegant. Sensual. Regal. Mysterious. Purple is seen as sensual and spiritual as it combines the sexuality of red and the sereneness of blue. It is best used with creative products, new products, or cutting edge products. Deep purple is associated with regal sophistication and lavender has a more subtle nostalgic appeal.
Neutrals - Classic. Quality. Natural. Timeless. The neutral tones of beige, gray and taupe emulate the psychological message of dependability and timelessness. They are regarded as safe and non-offensive and will not go out-of-date as they are always in style.
White - Pure. Bright. Pristine. Simple. While white can signify clean elegance, it can also be considered generic and stark, unless you have stylish graphics to compliment the white.
Black – Strong. Classic. Mysterious. Powerful. Black is most closely associated with the night. Black is seen as powerful, dramatic, elegant and expensive. In food packaging, a customer will actually pay more for a gourmet image. Although black is associated with mourning, its positive associations far outweigh its negative. Warning: too much black can be overkill.
10 Tips To Creating Fast Loading Websites
Seems to me like most web users (me included) are always in a hurry when browsing. Statistics show that, without a compelling reason, the average user will not wait for much more than 10 seconds for a page to load. So does that explain why your visitors seem to spend less than 5 seconds in your site? Probably your site is taking too long to load thus putting off visitors.
As you design your site, loading time should always be a priority if your site is to be an effective business tool. Balancing usability and aesthetics is a delicate matter when creating a fast loading site. You can have a colourful website but takes ages to load while on the other hand you can design a simple site that loads faster than you can brink. Below are 10 tips and tricks that I have found very useful that you can use while designing your fast loading website.
1. Use images sparingly.
Images may enhance the appearance of a website but it greatly increases its loading time. While optimizing images will make the pages load faster, overuse will not have the desired effect. For example, if you use over 75% of your page content as images chances are that your pages will load very slow.
2. Use HTML to design your pages
HTML when used well can be very effective in creating fast loading pages. You can create simple and elegant sites using plain HTML, CSS and few images.
3. Minimize animated gifs and flash usage
Wherever possible use very few animated gifs and flash files. As much as they enhance web page appearance they usually bog down the loading times so use sparingly.
4. Use background images
Instead of using full images, use background images for headers and footers. In this way you get to use a strip of the image of uniform design instead of using an image 779px wide.
5. Avoid using Javascript and flash scripts
Most of these scripts contribute greatly to slow loading pages because they usually have to load some items first before they are rendered. For example, Javascript drop menus are very useful in creating seamless navigation but unfortunately increase page load times significantly. Consider using CSS with which you can have drop down menus.
6. Optimize your HTML
One of the reasons why pages may load slowly is huge page size as a result of useless or repeated HTML tags. Validating your site is one way of optimizing your HTML.
7. Avoid using multimedia files
Unless your site is an entertainment one don’t use multimedia files especially as background music unless you absolutely have to. Providing a download link or an online player is better than using the files as background music.
8. Use Templates
Using templates will not only ensure uniformity throughout your site but will enable subsequent pages load faster because the structural images will have cached and thereby reducing the load times significantly.
9. Optimize images
Using an image editor like Photoshop, or Ifarnview, images can be optimized to load fast depending on their intended use. Appropriately resized and cropped images will greatly reduce the loading times of a page and at the same time maintaining their integrity.
10. Check your loading times
Finally check your loading times using plugins such as Fasterfox in Firefox to see how long your pages are taking to load.
What You Need To Build An Effective Adsense Site
One of the greatest lies about making money online is this: Build a site, put up some Adsense ads on it and you will be raking in the dough. If only that were true, but unfortunately it isn't that easy.
The trick to putting up an Adsense site that actually makes money is this: You need to have a site that displays ads with the most profitable keywords available and get traffic to your site the cheapest way possible.
So how do you know what are the most profitable keywords? You can use the Google AdWords Traffic estimator. The basic functionality is available for anyone to use, even without an AdWords account. Just enter your keywords in the text box at the top. You can leave all the other fields blank for now. Push the Continue button at the bottom of the page and you will see how much each of your keywords costs to get the #1-3 spot in Google AdWords.
How does this help you to find profitable Adsense keywords? First of all, you are splitting the price of the keyword with Google every time someone clicks on your ad. The actual percentage is not know, but most experts agree that it is about 50%. If a keyword costs $20 for the number 1 spot and someone clicks an ad on your page that uses that keyword, then you will get somewhere around $10!
You should know that high priced keywords do not mean high levels of traffic. The traffic estimator will also tell you the number of clicks per day that each keyword is getting in the number one spot. What you need are keywords that are a balance between the most money and the most clicks per day.
Another thing you need to know before building an Adsense site is which keywords to use to bring in the most traffic. You don't want to go up against ten million other sites that are all talking about the same thing that you are. What you need is a niche topic, something that people are hungry for information about. Here is a step by step process for finding a niche topic.
1. Download a free keyword tool from http://goodkeywords.com.
2. When you get it, enter the most general keyword about your topic that you can find. It will give you a list of related keywords from the Overture search engine along with the number of times each one of those keywords was searched for in the last month.
3. For every keyword that the Good Keywords gives you, enter the following search into Google: allintitle:yourkeyword. Look at the number of results that Google displays for each keyword.
4. Divide the number of results by the number of searches and you will come up with what is commonly referred to as the R/S ratio. In economics, this is called Supply/Demand.
5. Look for keywords that have a high number of search, but a low R/S ratio. I wouldn't choose any keyword unless there were at least 1000 searches per month and an R/S ratio of 2.0 or less.
6. Take the most profitable keywords in this group and build your Adsense pages around them.
Alright, so you have the most profitable keywords that are in high demand. You now need to have some content related to each keyword in order to get Goggle to put the right kind of ads on your page. You can either write this content yourself, or you can go to one of the many free article websites on the net and grab some free articles related to your keyword. Just make sure to give the author credit for the article, it's not nice to steal.
Once you have your article, start putting your Adsense ads in the middle of the article, about once every few paragraphs or so. I have found that this is the most effective way to get people to click on your ads. You are allowed up the three sets of Adsense ads per page, so place them wisely.
That is really all there is to making a profitable Adsense site. Just find the best keywords, get some articles about them, add your Adsense to them, drive traffic to these pages, and start making money.
5 Steps To Ensuring Your Website Is Secure
Anyone who is doing business over the internet needs to have secure web hosting. There are many security threats, and anytime you're dealing with customer data you need to be sure it's safe from prying eyes. This is especially true if you're using a shared host, where multiple websites are hosted on a single server.
If you're considering shared hosting for your business website, check with your hosting company to find out what kind of security they use on their systems. You want to be 100% sure that your website is not accessible by any of the other people hosted on that same server.
You should also find out about the host's policies regarding scripts and software installed on the server. If unproven code is allowed, it can lead to problems if someone else on the server is running a program that is poorly written.
The third thing you need to check is what the host's policies are regarding operating system upgrades and maintenance. Windows gets most of the bad press about security problems, but they happen on Linux and Unix as well. You want to be sure your host applies these fixes quickly once they are released.
Fourth, find out how often your host audits their security, and whether they do it themselves or use a third-party to do it for them. Even the best maintained systems can sometimes fail, and having an audit done - especially by a third-party - can sometimes uncover problems before they get exploited.
Finally, take steps to protect yourself as well. Don't use easy-to-guess passwords for your website, and don't use the same password for everything. If someone can guess your password, they can wreak havoc on your site.
These five steps will go a long way to ensuring that your website and - most importantly - your customers' personal data are safe and secure from attack or theft.
