If you know it or not, colors speak very loud to our subconscious and have a positive or negative reaction within 90 seconds. On the web you have less that 30 seconds to make a good first impression.

Are you using the silent language of color to impress, motivate, divert and persuade your prospects to buy from you?

The following lists a partial summary of how colors stimulate with mental and emotional responses.

BLACK suggests authority, power, boldness, seriousness, is distinguishing and classic. Business wise it's great for creating drama and is good for a background color (except on websites, it is very hard on the eyes). It is ideal for text on a light background. Black also implies submission and is associated with
evil.

BLUE suggests security, authority, faithfulness and dignity. For business it suggests sanctuary and fiscal responsibility. It is the most popular and the second most powerful color. Blue can also be cold and depressing. People are more productive in blue rooms.

BROWN suggests richness, politeness, helpfulness and effectiveness. In business it suggests less important items. Solid, reliable brown is the color of earth and is abundant in nature. Light brown implies genuineness while dark brown is similar to wood or leather.

GRAY suggests authority, practicality, earnestness and creativity. Business wise it is traditional and conservative.

GREEN suggests health, fertility, freedom, freshness, healing, tranquility and jealousy. Businesses use it to communicate status and wealth. It is the easiest color on the eye and can improve vision. It is a calming, refreshing color.

ORANGE suggests pleasure, cool, excitement, cheer, endurance, strength and ambition. For business it is good for highlighting information on charts and graphs.

PINK suggests femininity, gentleness, well being and innocence. For business you must be aware of it's feminine links and implications.

PURPLE suggests spirituality, royalty, luxury, wealth, sophistication, authority and mournfulness. In business it is upscale and works with artistic types. It is also feminine and romantic. However, because it is rare in nature, purple can appear artificial.

RED suggests excitement, strength, sex, passion, vitality, aggressiveness and commands attention. Business wise it associated with debt, is great for boldness and accents. The most emotionally intense color, red stimulates a faster heartbeat and breathing.

WHITE suggests refined, purity, devotion, contemporary and truthfulness. For business it can be sterile and refreshing. The best color on the web for a background color. Doctors and nurses wear white to imply sterility.

YELLOW suggests warmth, sunshine, cheer, happiness, jealousy deceit and cowardice. Business wise it appeals to the intellectual types and is a good accent. Yellow enhances concentration, hence its use for legal pads. It also speeds metabolism. It is the most difficult color for the eye to take in, so it can be overpowering if overused.

Green, brown, and red are the most popular food colors. Red is often used in restaurant decorating schemes because it is an appetite stimulant.

People respond more to non verbal cues than verbal ones. Make sure you use the psychology of colors in all your marketing, especially when you can't be face to face. It's important to match the emotion of your product or service you are promoting with the colors you are using.

This may seem like a rather trivial question – after all, how much of a difference would an Arial 10pt font make over a Verdana 11px size font? However, when approaching a website project it is always good – even necessary – to do so from a 'big picture' view. You may have read recently how a web user will judge a website in less than a blink of an eye. I know from personal experience that if I chance upon a website that does not 'look' like what I am looking for, I may not even let it fully load before I hit my back button. Every aspect of your website, from the layout to the colors to the font selection plays a role in the ultimate presentation of your website.

The truth is, most experienced web surfers have learned how to distinguish a quality website from an unprofessional website. It does not take much to turn off a web surfer. Because of this, it is absolutely essential that you present your website in the best manner possible. This includes looking at the font that you use.

Extreme Examples

On occasion a website owner will submit a review to the Site Review Please section of the Site Reference Forums that sports a website with an absolutely horrible font choice. These sites may have a very unique font choice (usually a highly stylized font) or a font that is all in italics, bolded, or even all capitalized.

Let's make one thing clear: all bold text, non-standard fonts (standards being Arial, Verdana, Times New Roman, or even Georgia), or other highly stylized fonts are NOT acceptable when building your website. Although standard fonts may seem 'boring', they are easy to read, and readability should be the goal of every website.

How Long is Too Long, and How Short is Too Short?

While I started my plans to redevelop my sites, I happened to come across a few studies which looked at line lengths. I never considered exactly how line lengths would effect the readability of a website, but as I considered the topic further I realized that line lengths make a significant impact on just how readable a website actually is. Consider the following example:

Although that example is a bit extreme, numerous studies have consistently shown that line length affects how quickly a reader can read a document. Furthermore, line length also affects how the user perceives their experience reading that site.

After doing some research, I found this study which showed that the optimal line length for adults was 65-75 characters per line. For children that line length was shortened to 45 characters per line.

How true is this in regards to your website? It is fairly easy to test if you use CSS. Take a section of your web page whose width is declared explicitely through CSS (as an example, a DIV tag with a significant amount of text that has an explicit width of 500 pixels). Change the width of that section to 35em (em's represent approximately the width of one character). This should make your line length approximately 70 characters. If you would like to test what that same section looks like at 50 characters per line, change the width to 25em's (the relationship here is 1em = 2 characters). Judge for yourself which length is more readable.

Which Font is the Most Readable?

Along with reading about optimal line length, I spent quite a bit of time looking up information on which font style was the most readable. Many people claim that Verdana is the most readable font for the web while others swear by Arial. Yet tradition holds that Times New Roman is the most readable font (as well as its close relative Georgia).

Unfortunately I could not find a consensus among the several studies that I read. Each had their own methodologies which came to differing conclusions on the specific font-size and font style (ironically enough, verdana was never listed as the most readable font, although it usually tested as one of the most readable fonts). Some measured the performance of readers while others asked users for their actual experience in reading the website. The result was recommendations for just about every combination of Arial, Verdana, and Times New Romain with varying font sizes.

This lead me to several conclusions about fonts:

- Arial, Verdana, and Georgia are all very readable fonts. Times New Roman, while highly readable, is often looked upon as "unformatted" and viewed as "unprofessional" on the Internet.

- Larger text is not always better. Readers had trouble reading text that was too large – fonts such as Verdana lend themselves to a smaller relative pixel size (for example, the largest text size that should ever be used in a standard paragraph is a 12pt font – probably 10pt for verdana)

- Line height (as controlled by CSS) can impact a font's readability. A line height of 120% was recommended by more than one study, although I have found that line heights as large as 200% can be very readable.

-The length of a page and surrounding elements also impact a page's readability – keeping space between the 'readable' portion and navigational elements is essential (often referred to as the gutter).

A Practical Application of Fonts

The problem with font usability studies is that they all try to measure the usefulness of fonts according to a specific model. Websites, unfortunately, are not all built according to one model. Some websites are setup as online guides, blogs, or news sites which are content-heavy while others are setup to sell a product or service and thus are more presentation/stylistically designed. Although all websites should aim to be readable, sometimes readability can be sacrificed for building the proper image.

A good friend of mine, who has owned a hosting company since 1998, swears by using 9pt Arial justified font for all of his websites. His goal has always been to present a cleanly styled website that is not cluttered, uses cool, relaxing colors, and gives an air of simple sophistication. For that purpose, 9pt Arial justified font works fine, although I would challenge any person to find a study that shows this to be the most readable font styling.

Although readability can sometimes be pushed aside for style, this does not mean that it is ever acceptable to present an entire website in bold text or some font that is greatly different than an Arial, Verdana, or Times New Roman font. It may be tempting to choose a creative font for the purposes of being different, but the reality is (beyond the technical problems of browsers rendering a custom font) that readers are only willing to sacrifice so much readability for the production of a marketing image on your website.

My Choice for the Best Font

Although I personally have not conducted any scientific study to determine which fonts can be read the fastest, or which fonts are most pleasing to users, I know that users want to be able to read the content on a website with relative ease. Furthermore, I know that it is necessary to convey a sense of professionalism and pride in my website.

As a result I will probably continue with an Arial font at around the 10pt font-size (11-12 pixels). Verdana is a close second behind Arial. Times New Roman, although highly readable, gives a sense of being 'unformatted' since it is the default font format of the Internet, and Georgia simply seems pretentious to me. I will also stick with the 70 character per line recommendation.

Why did I choose this font? Ultimately it was subjective. However, I do know that Arial fonts, especially at the 10pt size (or 11 -12 pixels) are easy to read. I also like the look of Arial, although Verdana has a nice sleek look as well (which is why it was a close second). Ultimately your font selection is a subjective decision that will come down to the image you are trying to present for your website. Just remember that part of that image is painted by the words you use and the ability of your users to read your website.

Take the time today to play around with different font styles, font sizes, line lengths and line heights. You may find that your site suddenly becomes sleeker with Verdana, more sophisticated with a light, well-spaces Arial, or more formal with a well presented Georgia font. And that difference may be all that is needed to take your website to the next level.

I wanted to create a site that was going to be both incredibly user friendly and informative, and at the same time earn a bit of revenue from Google Adsense! Why not?

So with this great little idea, I blindly set off and started to create what was going to be a online resource of complimentary recipes on www.mom2me.com.

This brings me to my biggest and most costly mistake ever. Lack of planning!

I cannot stress the importance of this aspect enough. I would have saved myself literally weeks, if not months, by simply sitting down with a piece of paper and planning my layout carefully.

In all fairness to myself, I must say that I am not a site designer by any stretch of the imagination, but was rather finding my way around the wonderful world of web design and pain by an uncalculated process of trial and error.

In summary: Plan, plan and then plan some more.

If you still doubt why I stress the importance of planning, I will explain in practical terms what happened to me in the creation of my site. If this doesn’t bring the message home, nothing will!

Scripts in the Header section of your site.
As I mentioned earlier, I really wanted to make the site simple and easy to navigate. All the recipes on the site should be easy to copy, paste, mail to a friend and even bookmark.

Well, this is where my first blunder crept in. I decided to make use of some great little scripts on the site to enable users to mail recipes to friends at the touch of a button and also bookmark the page rather effortlessly.

The scripts were really simple to incorporate, but after doing about 100 recipes, I read an article explaining the dangers of adding ‘full’ scripts in the header section of your pages. I learnt that by adding to many scripts in this section of the page makes it difficult for the ‘bots’ to read the content and that it could adversely effect your Page rank and Search engine placing.

This is not a good idea as you might imagine and thus I spent several days rewriting every single page and placing the scripts into separate JavaScript files. This was not the last time I did this!

Search Facility
I really wanted to make it easy for visitors to be able to search for content on my site but I decide to leave that as a phase two of my development. Mistake!

After stumbling across Google’s great ‘search my site” facility I decided to add it to my site. Great idea, but due to the fact that I didn’t add proper Meta Keywords on every page I had a small problem to overcome.

Yep you guessed it. I had to redo every single page on the site yet again. Ouch!

The base tag functionality
Deciding to make use of the base tag functionality within Dream Weaver was a great idea to simplify my designing process, but…

When finely it was time to create my sitemap I suddenly realized that I had countless (almost a hundred) broken links and although it was my own stupidity I still had to re-do almost all my links, on all my pages. Watch out for this. It is an absolute spirit crusher!

My advise, make use of the full URL in all your links on all your pages i.e. http://www.mom2me.com/promo.htm

Site Navigation
I have left the best for last. Due to a complete and utter lack of proper planning, I realized that I omitted a section of the site for people to sign up for my Newsletter.

As everybody who has probably ever done a site knows, this is a crucial part of your site. Whether you are selling directly from your site or whether you plan to do mailing campaigns at a later stage with some marketing material on them, it is crucial to collect as many e-mail addresses as possible, as often as possible.

Well, this forced me to redo the very basics of my pages and … yup redo every single page again.

Now, by now you might feel sorry for me or you might just feel that I am a complete and utter idiot. Regardless of your feelings, I think that from this very practical example it is abundantly obvious that a lack of proper planning will only lead to heart ache and countless sleepless nights. (I think I actually have even less hair!)

Plan your site carefully and live happily ever after!

However, what I did do was keep a record of what went wrong and believe me when I say it was quite a record!

Herewith then, a couple of things that you might want to remember or pay attention to, should you ever launch a new site. Some of these items may seem trivial, but I think this should be a basic check list for all new sites.

All of the items below turned out very important in creating a site that is Search Engine friendly and will hopefully get you good placement!

1. Define the purpose of your web site. It could be something as simple as "I want to sell my 5 products through my web site" or "I want to create a site where my organization members can get a schedule of events and view our employee handbook through a password protected area." You can and will most likely refine your definition as you go but make sure you have some clear direction. This was exactly what happened with Mom2me.com!

2. Define your keywords. This is probably the most important aspect of starting any site and you should really spent some time on this. I made use of two great sites to help this. Have a look at OneLook Reverse Dictionary and Wordtracker!

3. The new sites’ URL. You have to ask yourself the following questions:

• Does it contain your Keywords? (in the case of Mom2me.com not! – Oops)
• Is the URL to long? (In this case no, I don’t think so)

4. Check the page title. Does the page title contain your keywords? This is very important for good Search engine placement. Also make sure that it is not to long.

5. Check the Description tag. Does this contain your keywords and is it too long? As you may notice there is a bit of a trend here.

6. Check the Keywords Tag. Once again, does it contain all your keywords and in order of importance and relevance? Always try to place the most relevant keywords first and never, ever place any irrelevant keywords. This does actually negatively affect your rankings!

7. Make use of ALT Text. Always try to make use of your keywords in the ALT text of images on your site. Not only does it help people that can’t display pictures, but it also increases the occurrence of your keywords on the site and we all know what that means!

8. Check your body text. You guessed it! Does it contain enough instances of your keywords? You should also consider the following:

• Does your body text contain enough content?
• Is your body text human-readable?
• Does the page have excess HTML markup which could be removed?

9. Linking pages. Do all pages in your site link to each other? It has been said that you should be able to access every single page within the site with no more than two clicks. I don’t know if this is strictly correct, but the principle is definitely sound!

10. Promoting your site. The old adage “We have built it, so they will come” does not hold true in this scenario. We really have to promote our site and make sure that we will get the visitors. Here are a couple of things that you should ask yourself:

• Does the site have a site map? (Something I still need to do for mom2me.com)
• Is it possible to issue a press release about this new web site?
• Can you submit this new site to web directories?
• Could you mention your new site on relevant web forums?
• Could you trade reciprocal links with similar web pages?

I really wish you all the best in your efforts in getting that new site up and generating traffic. If you have any questions, I will gladly help where I can, but as I recently discovered, I am by no means an authority! Sometimes it is worthwhile to call in the cavalry! (Professionals)

Article by Werner Coetzee

The problem lies in the fact that the essence of site creation has moved radically from where it started as an information and entertainment medium, it has changed to almost the opposite and in some cases even to complete rubbish.

So, before you even think of getting your little spot on the web, what should you be sure of, know and be aware of. What are the things that will make my site worthwhile and an asset to the web? What should I create to be able to cash in and earn some revenue for my days and months of hard work? Well, I would like to propose some basic ideas.

Firstly, I firmly believe that any author (website creator) should concentrate on things they know about or at least very familiar with. There would be absolutely no point for me to create a site on nuclear fusion (in fact starting would be a problem). You have to start with something that you can inform and/or entertain with, if you want your visitors to return at some stage. Use this wonderful platform to share your views and express yourself to the world. Not many other mediums allow this to such a massive extent. Share yourself!

The next important aspect, if you do want your site to really draw some attention on a ongoing basis, would be to ensure that the content on your site is as timeless as possible. I recently helped my mom create a site (http://www.mom2me.com) to host her recipes and it is an excellent example of a site that is timeless. Recipes do not get old. The information on your site, unless you want to constantly update it, should not get old either and a great idea would be to choose a topic for your site, where the information never ages. Jokes, photos, good articles etc. are all great examples of non-ageing content. Blogs are great for easy and quick uploading but still the material needs to be timeless as far as possible.

Try to be original. Easier said than done, I know, but try to not to start yet another site featuring the same old jokes. Not only will you never be able to ever monetize your site (earn revenue from it), but it would just be a copy of another person’s expression. Something as simple as creating a site on a smaller section of an existing site could be a great idea. What about a site dedicated to jokes about plumbers (if you really have to do a joke site). Be original not only in what you create, but what you represent as well.

Start small. I do not want to be the bearer of bad news, but you are not going to start a Google in the next year. Try to ensure that whatever you base your site on, is within your financial ambit and time sphere. You do not want to overextend yourself and leave the site halfway complete, by the time you realize that you have lost interest. It is always easier to add to a completed site and see it grow even bigger. Set realistic goals and try to achieve them within a specific period. Planning is critical and if you do it correctly you will never have to have those horrible “under construction’ pages on your site.

Lastly, and probably most importantly of all, think about how you are going to attract visitors, hopefully repeatedly, to ensure that you can earn revenue from your hard work. If you are thinking about making use of Affiliate Programs or programs like Google’s Adsense, always remember that they will require visitors. Visitors in return require a reason to visit in the first place and secondly to come back again and again. The only way you are going to ensure any form of revenue is by making sure your site is attractive, informative and generally a great place to visit.

In a perfect world, all sites would be as I described above, but sadly that is not the case. The good news is that due to the fact that more than 50% of sites are not that great, you are already halfway there, without even starting. Best of luck and I look forward to visiting your great site soon!

Article by Werner Coetzee

Alright I am reasonably new to the whole linking and link swapping arena myself, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realise that linking to sites that have similar or even complimentary products/services/information etc. will have a greater effect on your own site, than just some guy that is in a process of ‘link gathering’.

Firstly we should look at why people swap links.

The most important reason to link to a site would be to get more visitors from that site. Their visitors should be able to see your link and click on it. If it is hidden away on some arbitrary page somewhere in the middle of the land that time forgot, you are wasting your time. Chat to the webmaster you link to and make sure your link is prominently displayed.

The second reason we swap links (slightly less important according to me), is to grow your site’s link popularity.

Link popularity is quite simply ‘how popular your site is’. Search engines take note of how many links you have coming to your site and assume that the more links you have, the more popular and ‘important’ your site is. But beware!

Our Search engines (bless their little white cotton socks) are getting really smart and you should be careful as to who you link to (outbound links) and where you get links from (known as incoming links).

If you have inbound links from sites with a low PR (Page Rank – that is the Google rating for your site) it could actually effect your ranking in the search engines negatively. In other words you will drop further down the list in searches. Ouch!

If you would like a handy tool to check the PR of any page, you can get a handy toolbar directly from Google. I strongly recommend that you get something to be able to check the PR of potential linking partners.

Another aspect that affects your search engine position is linking to ‘bad’ sites. By ‘bad’ sites I am referring to sites that have no value or content and simply act as a type of banner or link farm. These sites have a low or absolutely no Google PR and they will only bring you down. Stay well clear.

What should the site PR be then? Well, any site with a PR of three or higher should have a reasonably positive effect on your site, but we can’t really generalize.

Always ask the webmaster whom you are planning to link to, exactly where your link will be placed. Check out the PR of that particular page and if where you plan to place his/her link is similar or his/her PR is higher it could be a good swap.

As with everything in life there are always exceptions, but something that always holds true is the types of sites you link to.

Only link to sites that are similar or complimentary to your site. If, for example, I sell shoes on my site, I will never link to a site that sells i.e. insurance. Not only doesn’t it make any sense, but even worse it will affect your ranking! Yup those search engines weren’t spawned yesterday!

So what would be considered good sites to link to?

They keyword here is synergy. A friend recently launched a rating site (http://www.hotmaybenot.com/http://www.hotmaybenot.com) and he asked me to help him with this issue.

After we spent about half an hour together we soon realised that the list was almost endless.

The first thing we did, was to take his top 20 keywords and do searches on those words. The results as you can imagine were just about endless.

We then had a look at the concept of the site and soon came across many verticals, like dating, flowers, poems etc. etc. etc. It was actually a whole lot easier than he ever imagined. He is now ready to approach hundreds of these sites with a link swap offer.

To conclude I would like to urge every ‘newbie’ webmaster thinking of increasing their sites’ presence to think just a little bit before they go out and gather random, non-sequential links. Haste and ignorance can really be to your detriment.

Remember. Be careful out there!

Article by Werner Coetzee