The Perfect Colors For Your Website

 Design, Guest Articles  No Responses »
Oct 082012
 

Success or failure of your website depends on a few factors. It is clear that the primary role belongs to the building of a website and its content. But what can be even more important – the colors used in the design of your site.
Designing a site is more about wise selection of colors, because they are the first thing that users respond to. Color has a strong psychological impact, subconsciously affects our choice, and in the case of the proper choice may cause the desire to return to the resource and use a suggested service or a product.

The importance of a competent selection of color scheme for a website escapes the attention of a vast number of designers. Color scheme is one of the main components of a website and it is simply obliged to reflect the features of your brand. Colors may keep your visitors on the website as well as make them leave. There are a lot of websites with excellent design and perfectly chosen content, but even an average user immediately feels that something is wrong when he sees a site with the wrong color scheme.

That’s why a designer should always be very attentive to the color scheme. The first impression which your web site will create depends on it. If you feel that the color scheme is not entirely successful, you need to reconsider it as soon as possible. If you do not like it, so your visitors will not like it too. Different colors have different effects on our emotional and physical conditions. They can cause both positive and negative emotions.

It’s obvious that the final decision to buy a product or a service is made under the influence of the properly chosen color as well as of other site features. So every website development company should put its eyes to the implementation of design with understanding that color is a powerful marketing tool. A designer who can manage colors and understands how color affects the emotions and feelings of a person, is able to develop a truly successful website design, which will make the right impression on the user even in his first visit.

To help you correctly navigate in the world of colors, we want to recall the values and properties of the primary colors:

Red is the most eye-catching and attention attracting color. It is active, energetic and aggressive, associated with fire, passion, life and activity. It can be frustrating as well as exciting; it can give strength, but may cause concern. Everyone sees a different red. It is better to use the red color with cool shades (blue, green, etc.) in the website design.

Red color urges people to make a quick decision. So if you need quick results, it’s good to use red. This color will be great for male site.

design color example

Orange color helps to get rid of unpleasant emotions, helps in communication, and gives buoyancy. Orange has some properties of red and yellow as it is located between these two colors.

This color is usually used on websites for young people and teenagers. Orange also fueling the appetite of the person, so it is perfect for cooking resources or website that promotes a restaurant. Slout people do not like this color, so better don’t use it for portal about diets, weight-loss etc.

Yellow is the color of the sun, fun, ease and freedom. It improves mood, helps to generate new ideas. The site with the yellow color creates an ease and lightness in the visitor’s mood.

Yellow motivates to communicate, meet new people and journey. It is best to use on portals about dating. Married and pregnant women like this color so it will be great choice for female website.

Dark blue – is a calm and wise color. It creates the feeling of security and stability. It helps to focus and realize the ideas. Do not tire your eyes. In the site’s design it is recommended to combine the blue color with other colors and more neutral shades.

The blue color of any shade is perfect for informational, educational, financial and legal sites. Dark shades of it can be used in the sports and political projects.

Blue – is the color of sincerity and peace. It gives creativity and helps you to get used to the changes.

Light shades of blue will be the great choice for sites about health or leisure (as this color symbolizes the sky, air, water and cleanliness).

Green – is the color of nature. It embodies harmony, goodness and naturalness. It has a relaxing effect.

Green color is often associated with money and power. So, it is used on corporate sites and sites related to the financial sector.

Gray – is a neutral color. It causes no strong emotional reactions. It is respectable, cold and formal. Usually gray is used for information portals and social networks.

Black – is associated with some mystery and conservatism. It commands respect and gives you a feeling of dignity and authority.

If you decide to use in site design this rigorous, conservative color, it will emphasize the seriousness of this resource, which is recommended for the so-called business sites.

 

A few tips on color mixing:

The main requirement for a pair of colors for text and background is enough contrast between colors for comfortable, fatigue-free reading.

Usually colored web-pages can be divided into two groups: those with a dark text on a light background and a light text on the dark background. The latter is much more popular than the first (if we ignore the traditional black and white pages that have a significant majority).

An example of a typical solution is dark text on light background.


The second type of colors refers to the light text on a dark background. In this case, it will be advantageous to choose a bright and rich tone of the text, which, of course, requires a dark background. An example:

And a site that compiles both approaches at once:


Colors in web design is an extensive, multifaceted and even paradoxical theme. Any talented web designer has a distinctive, recognizable “color style”. It is shown up not in a commitment to certain tones, but in the relation to colors, individual manner of contrast and harmonization of similar colors. That is why it is very important to be ensured that website development company that is working on your site is highly professional and has a number of skilled designers.

Any website development company should take into account all the nuances to provide the visitors of their websites with the most magnificent, stunning and memorable design. Properly chosen color scheme will create a favorable atmosphere, encourage visitors to certain actions, or will create the necessary feeling and impression.

About the Author

Zfort Group is an exclusive software outsourcing company based in Ukraine, Eastern Europe. Zfort Group delivers premium IT outsourcing services for clients from all over the worlds since 2000. All kinds of web development, consulting and B2B solutions were implemented in numerous successfully developed projects. Zfort Group is an excellent IT outsourcing service provider for the businesses of any kind and size.

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Benefits of Table Less Website Design

 Guest Articles  No Responses »
Aug 062012
 

As we know this is the era of modern technology and the number of websites is going to increase with every passing day. Website designing becomes very important in the modern aspect of competition. In the beginning developers prefer to use designing with table which was a traditional method but with the advent of technology the trend is changed now.

Table less design is becoming very famous with every day passing because it gives you more flexibility and ease. In table less web design the designer has no compulsion of using tables for page layout control. Now with the introduction of CSS in the field of designing developers prefer to use CSS to arrange text and other data. The basic reason behind this is to increase web accessibility.

vintage stage theater drapes

Vintage Stage Theater Drapes by Katrina Brown

What is web design?

The term web design refers to fine art or designing the website and changes can be made by designers and developers timely. Web designers play a vital role in the development process of website. There are different methods for this purpose. In table less website design we use to avoid rigid HTML. And page layouts were easily handled without tables and this isa search engine friendly technique. Buffalo web Design Company is very famous in this regard.

Advantages:

The designing of a table less website enables you to remove tables and to save bandwidth of up to 75%. It also enables you to organize facts and figures according to priority basis. When you need to replace any information it can be replaced easily without spending much time.

One more important aspect is that it allows efficient implementation. The table less structure enables you to easily load the web page with minimum time. In case if you are using HTML tables in your website it slow down the loading of page and it becomes difficult for the developer to make changes in page layout. On the other hand while using CSS in enables you to place information in a centralized manner and in the end if you want any type of changes you simply change the information without changing the full layout of the page.

It is also easier to add more designs in table less design without much difficulty. Moreover it increases the accessibility. And it is very economical in the terms of budget in contrast to designing with tables.

It gives a very good impression to the visitors. In the process of web development, one major aspect you have to be focused about, is to be user friendly, and to grab the attention of the user. If it takes time for the loading of the page, it detracts the attention of customers and they leave the page. So use the methods which are user friendly.

Buffalo web Design Company is very illustrious in the terms of web designing. It provides you maximum facilities and helps you in all terms. We ensure you to get high quality results and maximum output with minimum expenditure.

We facilitate our worthy customers and pay full attention to their requirements with no time.

This article is written by Konoozi.

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5 Car Website Design Templates for Inspiration

 Design  No Responses »
Feb 022012
 

Competing in the car market is certainly not an easy task for any company, taking into account the great sums of money involved in the industry and efforts applied in brand promotion.

While user experience is certainly the most important requirement, there are also such things as presentation, readability, and simplicity to name a few. Have a look at 5 car website templates below before you start with you car website design project.

1. Dark Theme

This style of website can be found all over the internet. Although it may seem plain, it’s very effective, especially for websites that are all about cars and other motor vehicles. This theme works best if you use something fairly bright alongside it. In this picture, the dark background contrasts an attractive car with an orange fire pattern printed on it. The bright color contrasts beautifully with the dark background, drawing the attention to the vehicle, which is the main object on the page and is essentially what the website is all about. If you decide to use something like this for your car website, remember not to use bright colors for anything other than the main image, as this will make your website look overloaded and too colorful.

2. Bright and White

A website design like this may not seem very attractive at first; however, it gives any website a nice, clean look. In order to get this effect, use images of vehicles that are silver or white (the same color as the website background). Using images of cars that are different colors, for example, a picture of a red car, will cause your website to lose this effect as the attention is drawn to the red car. This immediately gives your website an entirely different look.

3. Add a Bit of Color

If you like the plain white and silver theme but find that it’s a little too plain for your liking, why not add a bit of color to it? Your website can still have that “clean and tidy” look, but with a little extra color to make it more attractive. Before designing your website and adding the colors, think about one or two colors that you would like to use. Choose two colors that go well together, for example, green and dark purple like the picture above. Choosing fairly basic colors is ideal for car websites as it will make it colorful but not too bright.

Use headings and subheadings on your website to make it easy for people to navigate their way around. A website that people can easily browse will encourage your visitors to stay for longer and return again and again. A bold heading (the word “SAVERS” in this example) will draw the attention to the main part of the website, and you can change this regularly to whatever you want people to visit first.

4. Simple and Effective

This website design, while simple, is extremely effective. It’s perfect for informative websites that contain information and articles about various cars and other motor vehicles. Red and black are two colors that complement each other very well, and a website like this immediately looks professional, attractive and very well made.

A design like this is ideal for a website that is dedicated to a particular model of car. If you’re passionate about one specific car and want to dedicate a website or blog to it, a design like this is just the thing for which you should be aiming. Although it’s not necessary to copy this website design exactly, the female model featured here gives the website a look of class and elegance. The red car and the female model are both elegant and attractive; therefore, while they seem different, they’re very much alike.

5. Business Car Website

This is the most popular website design that you’ll find when you come across business websites. Although it is fairly plain and the main colors are black and white, the many products that are featured give the website the color and character that is needed. Because the products displayed contain some color anyway, adding bright headers and colorful banners would make the website too bright.

If you’re running a website selling cars, car parts or car services, this is the design that will work best. You can present everything neatly on your website and it’s very simple and easy for your visitors to find their way around. Make sure that you sort out the products or services into categories to make it extra easy for people to find what they need.

Conclusion

When choosing a car website design, think about the aims and objectives of your website. Once you’ve decided what purpose your website is going to serve, you can choose the design, templates and themes. The designs are in no way limited to those featured here, so if you’ve any ideas and thoughts, please feel free to share them and leave a comment.

Annie is a creative blogger for Dobovo, the accommodation site providing the selection of Kiev apartments on a budget.

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5 Tips for Graphic Design Students

 Design  No Responses »
Dec 202011
 

Considering an education in the world of graphic design? Great! This wide open field combines artistic flare and technological savvy in ways which no other field does. In this article we will offer helpful advice for students interested in choosing an education in graphic design.

kangaroo road signThe term “graphic design” can be used to describe everything from drawing a corporate logo, to creating a magazine layout, to designing a website, to creating a road sign. Because hey, kangaroos need publicity too.

Almost every application of graphic design will require knowledge of computers, and possibly programming. Even if you don’t foresee a life in web design, expect that your layout tools will be computer oriented.

With that in mind, let’s get into our five tips for students interested in pursuing a career in graphic design.

1. Increase Your Computer Fluency

You may have mad skills when it comes to updating your Facebook status and Tweeting what you had for dinner, but how much experience do you have in Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver? Can you program CSS or PHP? If you cannot program for the web, we recommend W3Schools.

Any of these software tools or program languages could be necessary depending on the concentration you wish to pursue. If you are interested in web design, you should take the time to learn some basic CSS. If you envision yourself drawing a lot of vectors in your future, get a copy of Illustrator or see if your high school has it on their computers for you to use.

Start now. Don’t wait to head off to college before you learn about these programs and languages. Many students will have familiarity when they arrive at college, and you don’t want to start behind the competition.

2. Consider a Four Year School

Technical colleges offer a shorter path to a career in graphic design. You can often finish up a program in less than two years, and be ready to enter the work force.

The problem with this approach is that it assumes we all know what we want to do with our lives at the age of 18. I changed my major during college and completely shifted my career direction. I have friends who switched majors more than once. Many of them are very happy in their current careers, which are completely different from the careers they envisioned as college freshmen.

The great thing about a Bachelor’s of Arts program at a four year school is if you diploma isolated stock photosuddenly realize graphic design isn’t for you, you won’t have wasted a few years of your life. You can switch majors, and still have many important credits under your belt that can be applied toward your new degree.

Keep your options open. You will be surprised by how many changes you will undergo between the ages of 18 and 22.

3. Consider a Community College

For the same reason we recommend a Bachelor’s program instead of going straight to a Technical School, a community college keeps your options open.

Community colleges offer the ability to obtain an Associate’s degree in two years. The Associate’s degree is generally not considered as prestigious as the Bachelor’s degree, but it is much faster to obtain.

You can also take the credits from a community college and transfer many of them to a four year school, if you eventually decide you want to go for the Bachelor’s. This is often a less expensive option too, as community colleges are typically great bargains.

If you decide after two years that you wish to hit the Technical College regardless, you can still accomplish everything in about four years.

4. Mix in Business Courses

This is an often overlooked opportunity. Your future could entail running your own studio. Many of you will do freelance work.

No matter how strong your artistic skill set is, you risk wasting it if you do not have basic business skills. In fact, if you envision yourself running a graphic design firm, I would go as far as to suggest a minor, or dual major, in business.

At the very least you want to pad your knowledge with some business courses which will prepare you for balancing your books, managing finances, and properly promoting your brand.

5. Have a Web Portfolio

Begin creating a portfolio of your best work on your own internet website. Expect prospective employers will require your portfolio to be available online. This allows them to quickly see your work, and get an idea of your capabilities. Plus, it is possible employers will find you before you find them!

As you go through schooling, regularly update your portfolio with your best work. Cull the work which no longer meets your increasing standards. Don’t wait until your senior year of college to put together your portfolio. Start immediately, and update it frequently.

Conclusion

There are a myriad of other tips we could give, such as learning how to network and learning how to write a killer cover letter. But these five tips are the most important to consider immediately, before entering college.

What degree did you pursue for your career in graphic design?

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Website Design: Image SEO

 Blogging, Design  No Responses »
Dec 062011
 

Last week we began discussing Website Design from an SEO perspective, and demonstrated the importance of Page Titles. Today we will show you how to properly include images into your design to ensure the search engines find your website and rank you for your target content.

Aesthetic Appeal of Imagery

Whether you are using raster drawings, stock photos, or your own photography, there is no question that the inclusion of high quality images vastly increases the aesthetic appeal of any website or blog design.

african-american-student-laptopProvided the images used in your design relate to your content, they will increase the appeal of your design to your readers.

Studies show web designs which utilize images have a higher visitor return rate. Studies also show that visitors spend more time on pages which utilize images in their design. The same websites have a lower bounce rate too.

Image inclusion in articles breaks up the article in a way which makes it more digestible for the reader. Besides adding emphasis to your article or blog content, the use of images increases the chance that a reader will continue reading your article, rather than abandon it.

Images and SEO

A search engine can only see words. It doesn’t know that the image on your Scared Construction Workerwebsite is a Monet painting or a Lisa FX construction worker. No matter how artistic and aesthetically pleasing the image is, the search engines will ignore it completely unless we tell them about our image.

The first thing we need to do is name our image appropriately. If you downloaded a stock photo with a generic file name, you need to rename that photo before uploading it to your blog or website.

The photo name should follow good SEO practice. It should be simple and relevant to the content on your website. If your website focuses on growing flowers, a good file name for an image might be “growing-dahlia-flowers.jpg”.

Notice our use of dashes? We use them because search engines struggle with underscores and tend to concatenate the words together when underscores or other characters are used. Google will recognize three separate words in this example, all of which can be found through their main search engine as well as Google Images.

Image metadata needs to be included. Make sure to use the image Title and Alt tags. Don’t leave them blank. These tags also tell the search engines about our images. Make them simple and concise, but absolutely relevant. Do not consider spamming.

I like to make the Title and Alt tags similar to, or the same as, the file name. Except there is no need for dashes. Using our example above, our image title and alt tag could be “Growing Dahlia Flowers.”

One more thing. Don’t include words like and, or, the, with, and so on if you can help it. Those words slightly decrease the relevancy of your true key words that you want search engines to focus on.

Image Placement

Image placement within our design or article comes down to both artistic reasoning and SEO importance. If the target key words used in our image tags are very relevant to our content, then the higher we place the image toward the top of the webpage, the more important the search engines will deem the image to be.

This makes sense. We tend to put the most important items near the top of our websites and blogs. Less important items are generally in the footer. Search engine algorithms are programmed to use this logic when determining which content is most important on a page.

Don’t sacrifice your design by placing an image near the top of your webpage if the correct artistic placement is much lower. Just be aware of how search engines will use your choice of placement to weight the importance of the tags used in the image.

We hope we gave you some good ideas you can use in your web and blog designs. Next week we will focus on some more techniques for improving our ranking and visibility within search engines.

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Website Design: Page Titles

 Blogging, Design  5 Responses »
Nov 232011
 

Whether you consider yourself a blogger or a website designer, it is vital that you pay attention to search engine optimization (SEO). We know you have a great website filled with valuable content and articles. Let’s make sure search engines understand what your page is about, and help people find you.

We Don’t Mean to Preach but…

Preacher about SEO

SEO is integral to great web design

SEO gets a bad rap. Some practitioners put on a black hat and try to game the results of search engines. That’s not what we do, and that’s not what you do either.

Search engine technology is amazingly adaptable. It is fascinating how good a job they do at crawling a website and determining exactly what it is all about. I’m not even talking about keyword meta tags, which of course we should have.

I’m talking about the actual content on your webpage, which in some cases could be thousands of words. It’s impressive that a search engine can parse this data and make an informed judgement of what your website or blog is all about.

As good a job as the crawlers do, we need to help them understand our content. We need to tell the crawlers what content is important, and what it should be focusing on. That’s where SEO comes in.

Start with Page Titles

Page titles are one of the most important portions of our blogs and websites when it comes to how search engines categorize our content. Depending on what SEO expert you talk to, they may be more important than our keywords.

We want our page titles to be descriptive of our content. This often times means sacrificing some artistic writing for a bland style which the search engines will understand.

Say for instance you have a website about Growing Flowers. On this website you have a blog post about growing blue Morning Glory flowers, which you planted on the first Monday of the growing season.

An artistic page title for this blog post might be “Blue Monday.” It’s catchy. But the search engines won’t understand what your content is about, unless of course you want to attract people who are interested in how depressing Mondays are.

You want to create a page title which is descriptive and contains keywords, without being spammy. Try writing your page title as “Planting Morning Glory Flowers.” Simple? Yes. Boring? A little. Jazz it up if you like, but stick to relevant keywords. Think like someone using Google. What keywords would they search for to find your page?

This simple suggestion is easy to implement. Yet we constantly see web pages with strange page titles that search engines don’t understand. A little change like this can skyrocket you upward in relevance rankings.

Page Titles Should Be Unique

Unique Page Titles

Be unique with all your content

Another important tip to remember is every page on your website or blog should have its own, unique title. Search engines consider page titles which are the same to be duplicate content. Duplicate content reduces the relevancy of each page in the eyes of search engines.

Going back to our example blog post on Morning Glory Flowers, let’s assume we have a lot to say about planting these beauties. Maybe we have so much to say that it goes on for three pages.

Should we have a unique page title for each page of this blog post? Yes. But it need not be complicated. All we need to do is amend our page titles to read “Page 1 of 3 | Planting Morning Glory Flowers”. The “|” will be ignored by the search engines, but it will provide separation for human eyes and improve your website’s navigation.

Avoid Underscores

Never use underscores in a page title, or in any description or file name. In a page title there is absolutely no reason for an underscore, yet for some reason people use them.

Besides being hard on the eyes, underscores are not read properly by search engines. Google skips them completely and does not consider them as a separator. Google reads “Blue_Morning_Glory” as “BlueMorningGlory,” which isn’t a word obviously.

If you must use a separator, choose a dash. Google understands the dash as a word separator, and will evaluate each word instead of concatenating them.

Conclusion

Proper page titling is a simple method for ensuring search engines understand what our content is about. Page titles have a large effect on what the search engine considers most relevant in our pages, arguably more so than our keywords do. It is important to keep our page titles unique, and to avoid characters which search engines struggle to understand.

No programming skills are required to make these important changes to our websites. It’s a method anyone can learn, and it will positively affect our search ranking position.

Next week we will look at more ways to help search engines understand our content, and show how we tag images in our blogs and website design.

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