In the first article in this series, we reviewed the psychological power of color and how colors are subconsciously associated with symbolic meanings.

Colors have the power to affect our emotions, perceptions, and interactions. I failed to mention the color symbolism in the first article, Web Design Tips: Power of Color Part I was based on a purely Western perspective.

Other cultures may view colors from a totally different psychological point of view than Westerners. For instance, Westerners commonly view the color red symbolically with love and passion.  But, it represents good luck to the Chinese, and purity to those from India. Red is the color worn by brides in the East and mourners from South Africa.  It represents Communism to Russians and a color of Christmas and Valentine’s Day to most Americans.

Find out what a particular color may symbolize before targeting unfamiliar cultures.  This will help you to avoid any unintentional offense. Otherwise, web designers trying to maximize the psychological power of color may have their attempts severely backfire.

That being said, this second article will focus more on the effective use of color combinations and how color can be used to bind a design together for optimum appeal. Here are some web design tips to help in choosing colors in your next web design.

Web Design Tip #1) Don’t use more than two or three colors on a single page. Too many colors become too busy and distracting.

Web Design Tip #2) Use the same background color on each page of the web site. Maintaining color consistency throughout the web design is very important to overall site continuity and avoiding appearing disjointed.  Think of uniform background color of all site pages as the glue holding the site together.  Take away your glue and the site starts falling apart.

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What do Nike, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola all have in common? If you said that they were well-known corporations that would be half true. All three of these corporations utilize corporate branding and have a recognizable image that the public knows without having to reveal the name of the company. Their corporate branding and image have been built with such strength that everyone knows what they sell. In business, this term is called corporate branding. In cyberspace it can spell dollars. It’s the consistent message that you market to the public and the emotional response or perception that people have when they think of your business. Successful corporate branding and image branding translates to customer loyalty, increased revenue and image marketing. Corporate branding and image branding should be consistently maintained and should stick in the consumers’ minds.  Often, consumers will remember the colors or the logo of a company - the image of the company. Corporate branding is the public relations of the business world. And there’s no better place for PR than the company’s website.

Building a Corporate Brand

Corporate branding and image branding are all around us. It’s in printing, logos and on the Internet. We cannot use a mouse pad or come across a refrigerator magnet without seeing a company’s image branded on the product. The purpose of image branding and corporate branding is to repetitively market your product or idea to the customer so that they recognize it instantly. More importantly, companies want that brand recognition to build revenue. Webmasters who own or run a website should approach image branding as a marketing tool and if an e-commerce website, a revenue generator. Deciding how strong an image brand for your site should be depends upon your objective for the website. If your website was designed to build and attract consumers, than image branding is a needed tool. On the other hand, if your website plans to draw visitors as an intermediary to a bigger website, than there’s no need to heavily invest in image branding. It’s easier to keep existing visitors than to attract new ones.

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Alexa is a web-ranking service that measures the traffic a website generates by looking at both the number of times a website is viewed per day, as well as the overall “reach.” Alexa rating is important because many advertisers and webmasters look at it as a way to determine the value of a link on the website.  As a result, managing your Alexa rank is important if you are looking to use link advertisements as a way to generate money.  With this in mind, the following are a few strategies for increasing a website’s Alexa rank.

Increase the Proportion of Your Visitors that Use Alexa

Alexa determines its rankings based on the number of users and site views from those who transmit data via the Alexa toolbar, also known as Sparky. The Alexa toolbar is commonly installed on a browser, such as Firefox or Internet Explorer.  As a result, visitors only count towards your Alexa ranking if they have the toolbar downloaded and installed.  Increasing your appeal to these users will rapidly result in your website moving up the rankings.

One group that often uses the Alexa toolbar is webmasters and other people interested in web design.  Developing content of interest to webmasters and encouraging webmaster visits will greatly aid in increasing a site’s Alexa ranking.  Another group that appears to have a great number of Alexa users is users in East Asia, based on the presence of several Asian websites in the Alexa top 500.  Advertising on Asian social networking sites may help increase the number of visitors with the Alexa toolbar enabled.

Increase traffic

The best way to increase traffic, long-term, is to develop quality content that leads to a strong base of users who visit frequently.  Aside from this, a few inexpensive Payperclick advertisements, such as those offered by Google, Yahoo or Exactseek, will increase traffic, and thus, your Alexa ranking. You may target keywords to audiences who may have a higher likelihood of possessing the Alexa toolbar, such as webmasters and other Alexa-heavy groups.  An alternative suggestion to this is buying banners or links from webmaster forums and websites.

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When developing a personal or small business website, it is important to make sure that the user feels interested in each page and that they are motivated to fully explore the website.  There are many strategies to accomplish this and we will explore several such ideas below.

Tip 1:  Make each page count

If a user is going to click on a link, they want it to be informative, interesting, and worth viewing in its entirety.  One way to ensure this is to craft each page to be either new information or content that is useful to the reader.  Each new page on your website should answer the questions “Why is this page important for the reader?  And why should they click the next link?”  If the page includes advertisements, the ratio (and placement) should reflect this goal.  At the very least, each page should contain a 3:1 information to advertisement ratio.  The ads should also be broken up within each page to ensure that the page is fully viewed; nothing dissuades a customer like a long block of ads with no original content.

Tip 2: Avoid clutter

Nothing undermines the professionalism of your website like distractions.  Do not rely on animation and sounds; they can be distracting.  A visitor’s eye is best trained on the text of each page and the links you provide.  Unnecessary flair detracts from this purpose.  It is like trying to read on a crowded bus while being constantly jostled.

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If you are starting a website, coming up at the top of a search engine results is a must, and doing so in a cost effective, organic method is most ideal. To this end, you may be considering SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  But did you know that getting hits on Google requires more than just optimizing your site for the right keywords?  There are a lot of ways to ensure that you are found with ease and relevance when someone is searching the web for products or services similar to your own.  Let us take a closer look at some of the key methods of achieving higher rankings in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

1. Raise your profile

The easy way to do this is to launch a blog.  Launching a blog not only allows you to plug in keyword, helping you get hits, but it gives you a chance to cross-promote and generate authority on the web.  Not only will this help raise traffic on the web, but periodic articles will enhance your SEO and raise the chances that when someone is scanning the web, they will come up with you as a result.

In addition to, or instead of, starting a blog, you can try to cross-promote. A great way to do this is to profile prominent figures and bloggers in your field.  Not only will including other notable people and companies increase your SEO, it offers many opportunities to increase your hits via tapping into the audience that supports the figure with whom you are profiling.

In addition, including information on other significant companies, websites, and bloggers, will not only increase your SEO, but will encourage them to provide links and profiles of your website, giving you additional back links and traffic.  No one can resist free exposure, especially if it is high level, and it serves two purposes, not only will it increase your SEO and hits, but it gives the blogger a reason to mention you, which will only add to your hits per month.

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The importance of branding should hardly come as any surprise.  Brands and logos are some of the most resonant images in the minds of consumers today. This is splendid if you, like McDonald’s or Coca-Cola, already have well established brands that practically serve as their own advertising.  But how does a startup company establish and create its own brand?  Here are a few important strategies for developing your brand.

Establish your brand’s dominance in your niche

Initially you must determine what your niche is.  This is extremely important; you don’t want to be one of the many businesses in your niche, you want to be the only (or best) one.  So look for areas where there is a relative vacuum, and launch your startup’s brand there.  In some cases, it may be best to define your brand geographically.  If you can target your startup to a particular region or community, not only can it help define your niche but it can also help establish the dominance of your brand in the minds of your target audience.

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Webmasters, maximize your web site’s appeal by incorporating effective use of color into the web site design. Color has psychological power. Humans subconsciously associate symbolic meanings with colors.

A web site’s color palette has the power to affect on-line visitors’ emotions, perceptions, and interactions. The right colors can help welcome visitors, soothe them, invoke their trust, and make them more tempted to buy.

Here are some web design tips to help you make more effective use of color in your web designs.

Web Design Tip #1)

Think of color as on-line window dressing. Real world brick and mortar businesses use attractive window displays to help draw passer-buys’ attention. Choosing the right color palette gives that same enticing appeal to on-line web site designs. It’s what binds your web site’s design together, giving it that professional store-front sparkle.

Misused, colors can have the exact opposite effect. Colors may unintentionally irritate site visitors, much like a bullfighter aggravating a bull by waving a red cape.

Web Design Tip #2)

Color choices should appeal to your targeted audience. The most effective color choices for a particular web design will not necessarily be personal favorites.

As a web designer, you are designing to impress your targeted audience. Help them more easily interact with your web page by choosing web design colors with this goal in mind.

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The Internet has been an integral device in changing the face of brand marketing. It shifts the burden of advertising from an outsourcing industry, where a separate company is used to target the needs of marketing a product. The Internet has taken a traditional industry, and opened it up to a new world of possibilities, adding new strategic ways to market businesses, products and services.

Web based marketing ties together the creative aspects of development and design from old school advertising techniques, with the technical aspects of the information superconductor that is the internet, to give birth to a whole new genre of marketing. The Internet has forever changed how marketing and advertising are handled.

Traditional Direct Mail Marketing

Direct mail marketing is a strategic approach that has been used for decades, and involves directly soliciting clients, repeat business and new business through a letter or postcard delivered by mail. This is an effective way to reach a large volume of people, at a fraction of the cost of a magazine, billboard or radio advertisement.

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A main component of a successful Internet branding marketing campaign is visibility. Marketing a product is a way of increasing the product or slogan’s visibility, raising awareness and getting the word out about your fabulous product or service. Once you are able to do this, you can then determine how best to entice potential customers. But first, they need to know it’s out there.

The Blog

A Blog is a type of online journal where people can freely express their ideas and interests. They can be about anything in particular, or nothing at all—blogs are often a forum for people to share ideas and information, and develop a community of people with similar thoughts and interests.

Blogs as Advertising

Blogs, in a sense, are an inherent way of advertising. If you are blogging about your life,  your new job, or a new house, you are actually advertising something – it’s just that you are advertising yourself. T

Creating a blog for your company is a powerful marketing technique that is a popular way to bring attention to your products and services. Blogging is also a strategic way to raise branding awareness and offer insight to your company and products. Blogging can raise brand awareness for your product by spreading the visibility of your company. A blog is another forum in which to impart information – and by having a blog for your company, you may reach potential customers who were not previously on your radar.

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Web site designs generally evolve in certain stages over time. Inexperienced on-line business owners and web designers become fascinated and enthralled with flash movies, Java script, animation, and all the other more popular “bells and whistles”of website design. They frequently implement website design tips and strive to create “the coolest” looking web site they feel will appeal to their target audience.

Unfortunately, what often happens is this they fail to realize customers may become irritated with extraneous flashy and noisy features after they’ve see them several times. Instead of enticing web traffic and potential customers, all those extra flashy features may actually be distracting, rather than attracting traffic and potential sales.

More importantly, if the web site has not been optimized, customers may not even be able to find it on popular web search engines. Web site owners should implement some method to monitor web traffic and test to see if certain added features optimize, or reduce, traffic to their web site.

Avoid the “Dreadful Four” website design pitfall.

Many web designers fall into what I call the “Dreadful Four”. By avoiding the dreadful four you will save yourself a great deal of time and money.  Here are the stages:

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