STEP 7: MARVINS SEO MARKETING 101 WEBSITE DESIGN

Best Practices for choosing your DotNetNuke Website Skin Color Style

Color communicates. Website color makes people react. We all learn to subconsciously associate color with certain judgments based upon basic human instincts, life experience and on other information we have learned.

What is important to a web designer is the poignant power of color. Color associations are programmed into our brain centers like computer ROM and have mnemonic associations that trigger memories or feelings. Web designers use these emotions to trigger action requests into actionable click trough's

Color and words have a lot in common. They are both powerful tools used to communicate your message, but if you use the wrong ones, you will be saying something you didn't mean..

We all learn how to use words at an early age but unfortunately, few learn how to use color. Unless you spend many hours working with graphics, web pages or art; talking about colors, culture, and age groups, you will find learning about color from most pro web designers will be a real lesson in geek talk, I used to think code junkies were hard to understand, but now I’ve met web designers, Boy I am I glad I took the easy stuff at BCIT like Micro Information Systems, Business Communications. and Marketing Management.

Different cultures have different attitudes, preferences, and body language thus; they will have different color reactions. In Asia, "white" symbolizes death, in South America it’s purple, and in North America it is black. People from warm countries respond favorably to warm colors; people from colder climates prefer the cooler colors.

Go back to Marvin’s DotNetNuke Marketing 100: Step 6 and take a critical look at your projected website customers. What messages do you want the colors to represent? Who are you communicating with?  A well-chosen color scheme with the right target segment will project a sense of reliability and trustworthiness that reassures web page viewers and entices them to complete your websites action requests. A poorly conceived choice of colors will send them hurrying away to click on your competitors web site. Maybe it is time to reconsider your website color design.

If you choose your websites colors because they are your favorite, then you have chosen it for the wrong target market

Marvin’s SEO Website Design Rule 2 - First, make sure you have the right target market. Second, Know what your market wants and Third, Pick your website colors for your market (the ones your visitors want to see).

You don't want dozens or hundreds of colors, just a main color with a few lighter and darker variations and maybe a few contrasting containers. To learn more about choosing the right colors for your customer age group, cultural diversity, target market segment and SEO web pages get My-ASP.Net’s Harmony SEO Web Design Guide

Web Page Fonts and Their Usage 

It seems as if the growing shift from serif fonts to sans-serif fonts is now projecting itself into online advertising and webpages. Nearly all the ads I examined used sans-serif fonts, often in addition to the company's "signature" font. A great font resource, is WhatTheFont

By simply uploading a simple JPEG, GIF, TIFF or BMP image, you can identify which font is used in a particular ad. This is particularly handy for when you find a banner or logo with a font you like but don’t know the name of.

If you truly feel like browsing for a new font, 1001 Free Fonts offers a vast selection of fonts. The only downside of this site is that the fonts are categorized by font name, and not by style. Remember: When you choose your font to keep all of your text within the same family. Never mix Serif with San Serif. If you're new to font selection here's a quick overview. Serif fonts, have "tails" that are used as decorative touches to the letter. Times New Roman and Garamond are two common examples of serif fonts. Sans-serif fonts are absent of the "tails," and frequently have much cleaner lines. Verdana and Arial are examples of common sans-serif fonts.