Colour Theory

No article about choosing colours would be complete without at least mentioning colour theory-the science that explains how colours go together. However, we won’t be going into detail about this, except to mention its importance in colour palette selection. While choosing colours can be done without knowledge of colour theory, for the colour scheme to work, the colours must follow the theory. In other words, if you know and can apply colour theory, you will find choosing effective colour palettes much easier. For more information, visit this link for an excellent primer.

Psychological impact of colour

This is dependent on factors such as age, gender and culture as well as personal preference. For example, every culture has different colour associations, and as a result it can be very difficult coming up with a colour that will suit all cultures (for more information, please see this article). The only way to select a colour palette that will appeal to your visitors is by knowing your target market.

While few people will have the time or budget to do a full-blown survey of a target market, an informal poll may be better than nothing, although you should be aware of the potential for misinterpretation. If you are fortunate, your target market’s reaction to colours will have been studied already, and a quick web search should provide you with some guidelines. Another good way to find out what colours work well for your market is to visit successful competitor websites and see if there is a common scheme in use (e.g. blue is often used by corporations: IBM, Microsoft).

Legibility

The consideration of text colour in combination with background colour is worth mentioning separately, as written content is normally the most important aspect of a website. High contrast text is easiest to read, and for this reason, black text on a white background is often preferred. However, beware of high contrast colour combinations that cause the boundaries of the colour to appear to “vibrate”, as in the following example:

Accessibility

In the US alone, 2,800,000 people are affected by colour-blindness (http://depts.washington.edu/ophthweb/statistics.html), and so this is an important consideration for any website. Colour blindness is more common in males, and also differs in prevalence depending on race, so again, knowing your target audience is important. By using tools such as Color Oracle you can replicate what users with the three main types of colour vision defects will see when they look at your website. For some more general advice on what to avoid and best practice, try the following.

If you are expecting elderly users or users with impaired eyesight, this is another consideration for colour, with high contrast colour combinations become more important (of course in combination with a larger font size).

While you do not have to limit the website colours you use so that they look the same to all your visitors, you can take accessibility seriously and ensure that your website can be used easily by everyone. As with all accessibility issues, automated programmes can only provide best guesses, and you should really see how your target market copes with your colour scheme by carrying out testing and getting feedback.

Conclusion

There’s a lot to think about before choosing your website’s colour scheme. What is clearly important is that you know your target market and their attitudes towards colours. Equally important is the ability to choose colours that work harmoniously together, to create a good aesthetic impression. Finally, a website that cannot be read easily or even used at all will leave visitors and potential customers with a very bad impression of your business.

What are they?

They are both small downloads that allow you to use your internet browser to enter a virtual 3D space. However, these two plug-ins take two very different approaches to dealing with 3D: while ExitReality allows you to view any existing website in a 3D space, a Google Lively environment must be created before it can be viewed.

Both applications are still betas and therefore a little ropey around the edges, and still ironing out bugs. Here is one quick review of ExitReality, and this video gives you an introduction to Google Lively:

The ability of ExitReality to turn ANY existing website into a 3D space is ExitReality’s biggest selling point and gives it a potentially crucial headstart. This feature opens up the whole Internet to a 3D ExitReality experience. Google Lively, on the other hand, requires a sufficient uptake of users willing to create 3D environments before there are many 3D environments to visit. This is no doubt Google’s intention: a gradual increase in websites offering Google Lively spaces, leading to increased incentive for users to download the plug-in, leading to more growth etc. And with the financial and marketing powerhouse of Google’s name behind it, it stands a good chance of succeeding.

Will either of these pioneering programs prevail? At the root of this question is another more fundamental one: do 3D websites have any advantage over 2D websites?

Benefits of 3D

Familiarity with our real world

The closer computers get to emulating the real world, the easier they will be to handle. At times, the ability to provide a 3D environment will make possible some online tasks and improve the ease of others.

Allows “face-to-face” interaction with visitors

When browsing a website with others, interaction with other visitors is limited to, at best, a list of names. With these plug-ins, visitors can “see” other visitors as other avatars, and over time the level of interactivity will increase.

Potential for commercial use

A 3D environment in programs such as Second Life, has already made possible conferences and meetings. While a separate program such as Second Life is a burden to download and learn, a 3D environment incorporated in a browser will make it easier to use as a tool, allowing e.g. online business meetings, educational opportunities

Greater opportunities for design and communication with visitors

Rather than being limited to a two-dimensional canvas, designers are able to create objects, textures and other elements of a 3 dimensional world. This freedom allows far greater opportunities to effectively convey the message of a website, and can enormously improve usability.

Problems with 3D

Unnecessary complexity

Often a user does not want the added functionality of a 3D world to navigate, they just want to “get in and get out”, e.g. read a news article. A 3D world requires greater bandwidth, and processing power and for a simple site will not improve ease of navigation.

Privacy

If you visit a website, you do not necessarily want to be seen by other visitors, or interact with them.

2D does not transform easily into 3D

While ExitReality makes great efforts to convert the 2D world into 3D, there are real problems in doing so. Good website design involves the careful alignment of page elements, such as headers, content boxes, sidebars, buttons etc., to communicate effectively with an audience. If an automated application tries to convert these, something is always lost.

What does the future hold?

There is a sort of inevitability to 3D. It’s been a long time coming, but it has long been a holy grail for technologists, and we are seeing it mature with more and more films being made in 3D. Looking at these two latest offerings, there is still some way to go before a 3D website is a stable option for any company, but this is a technology in its infancy, and future changes will bring better results. As many aspects of computer technology develop exponentially, we can expect to see this sooner rather than later.

However, whether or not all websites will adopt 3D interfaces is another question altogether, due to the diverse goals of different websites. A more likely scenario is that some websites, e.g. social websites such as Facebook, will be early adopters, while others websites will remain flat and 2D for a good time to come.

When assessing websites, it is tempting to assume the website with the greatest eye appeal has the best design. There are many websites which are extremely beautiful, with clever, inventive designs that lead to a “wow” reaction. While there is nothing wrong with this, if you want to have a successful website, it is not enough to just make a good-looking design.

Design is not art

Art is very different from design. Art is a personal interpretation, often leading to a very subjective reaction in viewers. Of course art has a place on the Internet — for example artists displaying their portfolio — but if personal artistic expression is not the goal of the website, art should not be included in the website’s design.

What is good design?

Good design is closely tied to the goals of the website. The design should be working to ensure the goals of the website are met, and should not be about creating a beautiful visual experience for a visitor. Although it is likely that creating a positive visual impression will help meet your website goals, it is not a requisite. For example, Google’s homepage is not breathtaking, but it is designed to be highly functional and effective.

A good website design will draw a visitor’s attention to the areas of the page that are most important (from the owner’s point of view). Not only this, but the visitor will be shown elements of the page in the desired order, and the design will help to lead to visitor behaviours conducive to “conversion” — whether that be filling out a form, downloading an E-book, etc.

In contrast to art, a good design is not subjective: all visitors should find the design easy-to-use, clear, effective and appropriate. Good design does not preclude fancy or involved designs and it is possible for good designs to range from bare-bones simplicity to extremely ornate. For example, for a website selling flowers a designer may decide a decorative floral background would lead to greater sales than a simpler design. However, the key is that every element of the design should work towards furthering the website’s goal.

Why good design is not easy

The prerequisite to creating a good design is having a clear website goal and knowing the target market. If you do not know what these are, you are not ready to create your website — unless you want to take a scattergun approach to website creation.

Unsurprisingly, creating a good website design is not easy. A web designer has to know how a target market will respond to a design and how to manipulate elements of the page to encourage the desired behaviour. This involves thorough knowledge of internet user psychology and behaviour (e.g. visitor eye movement patterns) as well as the key concepts of website design (e.g. the use of contrast to draw attention). It is this unseen, but vital knowledge that you are paying for when you hire a web designer.

Here is your opportunity to give your website a health check - without spending anything! Real Free Websites is giving away 3 FREE website assessments!

Photo by orangeacid

We’ll put your website under the microscope

We will take a really careful, close-up look at your website’s design and code, as well as Google rank for any terms you specify. We will then provide you with a completely free report assessing which areas might be affecting your website’s performance and what could be improved to make a difference to your conversion of visitors.

Obligation? What obligation?

There is absolutely no obligation to use Real Free Websites to make improvements to your website.

How to get your free report

To get a free website assessment just leave a comment below with the website you want to have assessed, and we will contact you. The first 3 requests we receive will get a free website report. So, if you don’t see three comments below, then you still have a chance to get a free assessment!

One condition: only one website assessment per person.

Missed this offer? Subscribe to our feed so you’re first in line for future freebies!

Ranking only for country search

While “power” is no doubt a non-competitive term in a mainly Spanish, Quechua and Aymara speaking country, it is still surprising that a page offering a WordPress template download is the number one result, especially as there are approximately 16,200 results. I can only imagine the surprised reaction as my Andean visitor realized that this download did not offer him/her any sort of “power” whatsoever!

Interestingly, if you “search the web” for power, the Real Free Websites page doesn’t appear in the first 800 results!

That makes much more sense, but it just makes the “searching pages in Bolivia” result all the more crazy. Real Free Websites is not based in Bolivia, does not have a server there, and yet it is coming up in the “pages from Bolivia” search. The only connection between Real Free Websites and Bolivia is a link from the Portfolio page to Care Bolivia. Oh, and now there’s this page that mentions Bolivia - so no doubt even more confused Bolivians arriving here…

How Google connects websites to a country

Google associates websites with countries using a variety of factors. One obvious way is through domain names, e.g. .co.uk is the country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) for the UK. Google also looks at web host location, although the importance of this is likely to be in decline as more people host their website remotely. More recently, Google allowed webmasters to set the geographic target of their website using Google Webmaster Tools.

Google also seems to make assumptions based on the data it has for websites. This data can be drawn from many different sources, such as on page information and language, Google searches, clicks from the search results page, and Google Analytics (a popular web stats tool).

It may look at the volume of traffic from one country that accesses a particular website, and statistics of the pages that link to it (and the volume of traffic these pages receive). What is clear from this result is that Google will also use statistics about the pages that the website links to (in this case Care Bolivia).

What does this all mean

It means that Google isn’t very good at deciding what pages belong to which country. Further proof of this comes from SEOmoz, where Duncan Morris highlighted an error in Google’s ranking for Apple in the “pages from UK” search. Apparently Apple’s UK subdirectory does not even rank for the search term “apple”!

It also means that a black hat, or malicious, search engine optimizer may be able to take advantage of the fact that Google’s results can come out strangely. By doing something as simple as linking to a website based in your target country, you may be able to get Google to think you are associated with that country. If you want to try that, good luck to you, but act fast, as they’re probably already looking in to it, and bear in mind, if you get caught, you may well be penalized by Google!

]]> http://www.realfreewebsites.com/blog/google-totally-messes-up-country-specific-search/feed/ http://www.realfreewebsites.com/blog/why-a-basic-website-is-always-better/ http://www.realfreewebsites.com/blog/why-a-basic-website-is-always-better/#comments Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:20:19 +0000 Real Free Websites http://www.realfreewebsites.com/blog/?p=25 A new website is often a major expense for small start-ups. As a business owner, you are faced with a choice when considering your first website. Assuming you have a small fixed budget, you can spend your money on:

• A lower quality website with full functionality
• A higher quality website with limited functionality

How do you decide which option is best for your business?

How much functionality do you really need?

How important is each feature you would like your website to have? Revisit your website goal and try and drop as much as possible without losing the core functionality of your website.

For example, do you really need the system to be fully automated now? Could you manually keep a record of users to begin with? Often the number of users/buyers you will first receive will be easily manageable.

Develop slowly

A gradual approach to web design is the ideal way to go when you are not 100% sure of what your end product should be. Even when you feel certain what your website features you need before completing the website, you will find your opinion changing as you:

1. become more familiar with the technological possibilities
2. see and use the website in real life
3. get feedback from testers and users.
4. get new ideas as your website developments

By avoiding creating a full-blown complex system, you will reduce your costs and any losses you will incur if your business does not succeed. Once you are doing better, you may decide you need the automated functionality, but equally, after seeing how your visitors interact, you may decide that a different approach would work better. By starting simply, you have developed an improved functionality. If you had committed to a large, complex website, you may be unable to make significant changes without going back and spending much more money.

Good for SEO

Did you know that some search engines, including Google, give an improved rank to older websites? In fact the age of the domain is one of the most important factors involved. By getting your website established early, you will get a headstart on building your domain’s trust and rank.

You can’t go wrong

This does not mean you should ignore planning and launch your website immediately. Planning your website is still a crucial element of success. However, when planning your website you should consider the points in this article.

When in doubt, you cannot go wrong with starting small, and ensuring you have a solid base on which to refine and build additional functionality and features. A basic website that is of good quality with fewer features will always be a better decision than a cheap (or even expensive!) website with a wealth of features.

]]> http://www.realfreewebsites.com/blog/why-a-basic-website-is-always-better/feed/ http://www.realfreewebsites.com/blog/how-to-make-your-website-stand-out/ http://www.realfreewebsites.com/blog/how-to-make-your-website-stand-out/#comments Wed, 04 Jun 2008 19:04:10 +0000 Real Free Websites http://www.realfreewebsites.com/blog/?p=23 A study found that users had created their first impression of a website within ¹⁄₂₀th of a second. This means that a visitor’s initial reaction is purely physiological - it does not occur at a cognitive level. How can you ensure your website gets a positive response?

Photo by fdecomite

The Halo Effect

This rapid reaction to a website is multiplied by a phenomenon dubbed “The Halo Effect”, which is a psychological effect described by Answers.com as:

“An effect whereby the perception of positive qualities in one thing or part gives rise to the perception of similar qualities in related things or in the whole.”

So the initial response to your website that your visitor experiences is incredibly important. The first impression that your visitor has is so powerful, it affects their mindset, causing them to see your website offering in either a positive or a negative way.

How to Create a Positive First Impression

All you have to work with is a small digital canvas, which is the user’s interface. This may be a tiny cellphone screen, or small 14 inch monitor or perhaps a large 24 inch LCD (it might also be a screen reader, but that is another topic). Whatever the dimensions of the user’s device, you have a limited 2 dimensional window in which to sell your website. As a result every pixel matters.

So how do you use this limited space effectively? You need a website design that is appealing to your target market audience.

Firstly, you need to be certain who your target market is. If you know who they are, then you need to know what they like. The easiest way to find this out is to study websites that you know to be popular with your market. Make a careful note of the colours, tones, shapes and style of the design.

Knowing the type of website design that is popular with your target market, you can now develop your own website design. Ideally, you want a design that is utterly unique, but contains the styles that appeal to your market.

Unfortunately, while creating a simple website is straightforward, creating a powerful design and user experience can only be done with extensive design knowledge and experience. Some examples of what a good web designer will consider:

Layout

Knowing how to reduce clutter and create appropriate focus. Judicious use of “white space” can lighten a website considerably, while drawing a visitor’s eyes to key parts of the page.

Colour

Knowing which colours match is not entirely subjective. Some colours work better together, while others can cause visual discord.

Contrast

This can be created using different colours, textures and sizes. Some contrast is essential, while too much is unappealing.

Typography

This is a major, but often overlooked, aspect of the design, as the text on a page is often a significant feature. It goes beyond choosing appropriate fonts, to include factors such as margin sizes, flow of text, line-spacing and letter-spacing.

Find out why website design is probably harder than you think: what makes web design complicated.

Conclusion

Of course the other big influence on people’s first reaction to your website occurs before they have even seen the design. The speed at which your website loads is often cited by users as a very important factor in a favourable impression - although some research suggests that perhaps usability is more important than raw access speed.

While speed and usability should not be overlooked, the creation of a website with a powerful, appealing design for your target market is vitally important to stand out from the crowd of other websites. If you have the necessary skills, take your time and make every corner of your canvas count; if you do not have the time or the relevant experience, hire a good web designer.

]]> http://www.realfreewebsites.com/blog/how-to-make-your-website-stand-out/feed/ http://www.realfreewebsites.com/blog/why-websites-fail-and-how-to-succeed/ http://www.realfreewebsites.com/blog/why-websites-fail-and-how-to-succeed/#comments Thu, 29 May 2008 15:43:02 +0000 Real Free Websites http://www.realfreewebsites.com/blog/?p=22 Sad, but true: a large number of website businesses will fail. Why does this happen and how can you avoid adding to the statistics?

Hard facts on failure rates are hard to come by (one informal survey suggests that approximately 70% of business websites in the UK are no longer live after 3 years) as private companies do not have any responsibility to report their performance, but the percentage of online businesses that fail is likely to be close to statistics collected for all businesses (one study cites a failure rate of 64.2% within 10 years). Depressingly, online businesses tend to do even worse than offline businesses.

Why do they fail?

Sometimes the failing is due to inadequate website planning. Failing to plan often leads to a flawed design, weak content, and poor usability, which translates into low sales or visitor conversions.

However, a website can be planned, designed and executed to perfection, but can still result in failure. The reason is simple when you step back: business is business whether in the “real world” or on the Internet. In the real world, you can design and build a store perfectly, but if you’re selling something that is wanted, or nobody knows about your store, then you will fail.

A lot of people seem to think that they can create a website and that entitles them to the share of the millions of Internet users worldwide. This is simply not the case. The internet is a ferocious marketplace. It is the great leveller, where you have to compete globally on the same playing field as any other individual, company or corporation. While this equality can work in your favour as you can compete with larger entities, it also means that everyone else in the world can compete with you.

Internet marketing is as competitive as any offline marketing. The bigger players have marketing budgets and departments focusing on selling their websites. Do you have a strategy to compete with that? There are many promotional strategies that you can and should employ after your website is finished.

Strategies for success

Here are three suggested options, that will keep you from wasting your time and money. While they are valid standalone options, they are not mutually exclusive.

1. A sound business plan

This is the most obvious way to avoid failure, and should be a no-brainer. It is unfortunately, all to often neglected or given reduced importance in the “magical land of the Internet”. There are enormous numbers of resources both offline and online for creating a business plan.

Make sure you actually listen to what your business plan tells you and don’t try and force the business plan to say what you want it to say. If the business plan suggests your potential profit is paltry, then by all means re-examine your model, but don’t tweak reality to give you a false sense of security.

2. A stripped-down tester website

If you can make a website or get a website made at a low cost, you may decide it is worth your while to go ahead without an in-depth business plan. However, at the very least your idea should have a stripped-down basic business plan.

3. A hobby website

Instead of approaching your website as a business, treat it as a pastime. If you don’t expect to make money off it, you cannot fail. Obviously this strategy will only work if you are passionate about your website idea, and have the motivation to keep it going even when you are not making a profit.

Conclusion

Whichever method(s) you choose, don’t forget that you still have work to do after completing your website. You cannot just sit back and expect for success. Even the best web application or website will fail if no-one knows about it.

If you have found yourself to be unfortunate enough to have a failed website, then try to take heart in the old cliché: failure helps you to learn. Next time you’ll make the big bucks.

]]> http://www.realfreewebsites.com/blog/why-websites-fail-and-how-to-succeed/feed/ http://www.realfreewebsites.com/blog/is-the-power-of-free-unstoppable/ http://www.realfreewebsites.com/blog/is-the-power-of-free-unstoppable/#comments Thu, 08 May 2008 02:14:39 +0000 Real Free Websites http://www.realfreewebsites.com/blog/?p=20 Increasingly you can find anything that you’re looking for on the Internet for free. Is this a passing fad or a long-term trend? One day, will we see everything freely available online?

Photo by aussiegall

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine is working on a book called Freeconomics. The theory behind this book is that companies are increasingly offering services and products for no cost at all, as technology marches forward, reducing costs so much as to be negligible. If Anderson is right, the outlook for the consumer looks particularly rosy.

Of course, there is nothing new to free. Free has long been financed by cross-subsidies, such as advertising or future sales or services. The difference, as Anderson sees it, is that the technology that powers the Web has led and is leading us to a point where the cost of offering services and products is very close to nothing.

We can see this clearly in web hosting, where costs are continually dropping, while features offered continue to improve. In time, it is not too much to expect to see zero cost web hosting offered.

In website design, web designers now routinely produce free website templates, although a customized website design still costs money. Real Free Websites is able to offer websites with no design fee by offsetting the cost of producing a custom website design with paid web hosting. Whereas web hosting costs are tied to technology and increases in efficiency will continue to lower costs to zero, web design is very dependent on human inputs. Technology can and does aid the process, but this is still marginal. Over time no doubt the assistance from technology will increase, and reduce the necessary man-hours that currently go into web design. However, as can be seen from comparing current automated web design software with manual coding, there is still a long way to go.

The great thing about Free is that it heralds innovation. Free cuts down the barriers and opens the gates. People don’t have to worry about losing money or taking risks. They are free to experiment, create and grow. We are pleased to be making a small contribution to this development.

A number of others have written about Freeconomics:

• Read Anderson’s article on Wired Magazine or a shorter version on the Economist
• The Guardian Online provides a lengthy summary
• Read Write Web provides an alternative view of Free, warning of its dangers and why it may not be such a good thing and leading to monopolies

]]> http://www.realfreewebsites.com/blog/is-the-power-of-free-unstoppable/feed/ http://www.realfreewebsites.com/blog/beware-of-cowboy-search-engine-optimizers-seos/ http://www.realfreewebsites.com/blog/beware-of-cowboy-search-engine-optimizers-seos/#comments Wed, 02 Apr 2008 15:59:27 +0000 Real Free Websites http://www.realfreewebsites.com/blog/?p=17

Search Engine Optimizers

Search Engine Optimization often abbreviated to SEO, is the process of changing a website to make it search engine friendly, and increasing the chance of a website appearing higher up in the search engine results pages.

Unfortunately, due to the:

• Intangible nature of the product (there is normally no change in the appearance of a website, bar minor text changes)
• Lack of clarity resulting from not knowing how a search engine determines ranking
• High average charges for SEO work
• General lack of understanding about what SEO involves

-there are a large number of rogue SEO companies looking to make a fast buck - without providing any significant value.

Before you even think of signing on with an SEO company, make sure you do some decent research, and talk to someone trustworthy who really understands SEO at a technical level. The key activities of SEO are actually very straightforward, but it is knowing what website changes are needed and where that distinguishes a good SEO company.

You have been warned…

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