General

Promoting your website can be a daunting task: it feels like there are thousands of ways to do it, but all of them take a lot of time or money for no guaranteed return. To help solve this problem, I’ve compiled a list of ten easy ways to promote your website.

1. Advertise in the Media. Now, you might have already ruled out advertising in newspapers and the like as too expensive, especially since the chances are your audience doesn’t live in any specific local area. That mostly rules out radio, too, and TV is even more likely to be out of your reach. What you might not have realised, though, is that you should stop looking at the general media and start looking at the specialist media for your area. For example, if you run a house-buying website, you could advertise it in specialist property magazines, and even on ‘lifestyle’ cable channels that show programmes about moving home.

2. Write Your Web Address on Things. If your business has any physical objects, whether it’s a product, a carrier bag or just the front of your office, make sure to write your web address on there. Even if people don’t keep or remember the exact address, it at least lets them know that your website exists.

3. Give Out Leaflets. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of old-fashioned paper promotion: leaflet as many areas as you can. The chances are that your website is targeted to a specific demographic rather than an area, but the post office will be surprisingly helpful when it comes to getting your leaflets where they need to go, if you ask them.

4. Go to Specialist Events. If there’s some kind of trade fair for the industry your website is in, turn up to it and promote your website. While there might not be all that many people there, the ones who are there will be influential, and can get your site talked about.

5. Put it on Business Cards. It should go without saying, but once you’ve gone to all that trouble to set up a website, don’t forget to put it on your business cards. After all, if you’re relying on them to get people to phone you, why not give them the option of reading more about you on your website?

6. Astroturf on Forums. An often overlooked way of getting traffic to your website is to participate on forums related to the subject and put your web address in your signature. This gets you more traffic than you’d think, especially at very popular forums.

7. Create Controversy. A great trick to promote your website is to use it to say controversial things: as the saying goes, any publicity is good publicity. This works best if you say something that you know will be provocative to a certain kind of person, getting it linked from all over the place. Bear in mind, though, that this strategy is better for advertising-driven websites than it is if you’re trying to build a reputation and make sales directly.

8. Keep a Good Blog. While more and more businesses are starting blogs, few of them are doing it right. If you’re using your blog to publish product announcements in corporate-speak, it’s useless. You need to remember a simple mantra, ‘views not news’ make sure your blog has something interesting to say.

9. Buy Search Engine Ads. Many people seem to think it’s some kind of admission of defeat, but search engine advertising can work very well, especially with keywords that aren’t already cluttered with ads. If you do it right, you can get very targeted ads very cheap indeed, ironically, the more targeted the ads, the cheaper they tend to be.

10. Start an Affiliate Program. Finally, if you’re selling something, don’t forget that old standby of web marketing: the affiliate program. Offer visitors a cut of the profits if they can sell your products for you, and all of a sudden you’ve got a crack sales team raring to go. The only trouble with this plan is that everyone is doing it, so you’ll need to offer a high percentage of your profits to your affiliates to make the offer attractive to them.

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One sticky point with many websites is this: they have absolutely terrible search engines. It does make sense, in a way, as searches are complicated to program for, and it takes time to write or implement a search engine on your site. Still, if you do search badly, it’s worse than not doing it at all.

Stick to Conventions.

If you look at the established search engines – Google, Yahoo, MSN and the rest – you’ll see that they follow a clear set of conventions when it comes to displaying search results. The titles of pages are large, underlined blue links, and they’re followed by an extract from or description of the page, and then the page’s URL. It looks like this:

Title of first search result
… here is the text where the keyword was found in the search result. the keyword will be in bold…
http://www.example.com/articles/123

Search results are ordered most relevant first, and are split across pages if there are a lot of them. The search box should remain at the top of the page with a search button, in case the user wants to edit their search. There should also be an ‘advanced search’ link, to help users make more complicated queries to your search engine (for example, pages that contain one thing but not another, or only pages in a specific section of the site).

There are many more conventions – study established search engines in some detail to figure out which ones will be important to you when you design your search. However much you might feel like it’s bad to just copy the search engines, they all copy each other anyway, and the reason they do it is that consistent interfaces are a big aid to usability.

Learning from PageRank.

Google’s idea of ranking pages by link popularity (that is, the number of pages that link to them using a keyword) is a good one, but lots of people seem to have forgotten it. Why? Well, because it doesn’t work all that well for indexing the whole web, where it’s easily gamed. When you’re doing searches across your own website, though, where you control the content and no-one can try to distort the link rankings, it’s a technique that works much better than counting the number of times keywords occur in each page. Of course, this assumes that your site links to other parts of itself well (it should, for the sake of rankings in the real search engines) and that your site is reasonably large.

Installing Search Software.

At this point, you’d have a big project on your hands if you decided to write your site’s search engine yourself. It’s much better to take an existing, open source solution written in whatever language your site runs on, and then adapt it to your own purposes in whatever way you need to. Good places to look for open source site search software are sourceforge.net and freshmeat.net, which both allow you to search by language and sort results by the popularity of the software.

Outsourcing Search.

Finally, if you don’t want to go to too much trouble with your site search, you might consider outsourcing it altogether: that is, making your search box send the user to the search results for your site at an external search engine. More and more sites with outdated or useless search engines are starting to do this, realising that they’re putting off users by forcing them to use bad search engines.

If you want to offer a Google search for your website, go here: http://www.google.com/services/free.html. Yahoo and MSN offer similar services, but they’re nowhere near as popular. You should really only consider outsourcing your search as a last result, as it looks amateurish unless you pay to customise it with your logo and design, and it may also have the unintentional result of sending your visitors back out onto the web instead of keeping them on your site. Still, if you really don’t have the time to spare to make a good search, it can be a useful alternative to have.

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Paint Shop Pro is one of the most popular image editors out there. Even though it’s increasingly geared towards digital photography, you’d be surprised just how useful it can be to web designers.

Features.

So what features does Paint Shop Pro have? Well, for a start, it supports just about every image format there has ever been. It can ’smart fix’ photos, to sort out any brightness and colour issues, but you can still adjust everything about your images manually if you want to. You get ‘picture tubes’, tiny little pieces of stock photography that can spice up your designs.

You also get all sorts of ‘arty’ effects that can make your images look like they were drawn in oils or chalk, and you can even create authentic looking black and white pictures. The selection tools are second to none, letting you select areas freehand, by shape, or using other factors like colour and brightness. PSP is especially good at removing foreground elements from their backgrounds, and letting you combine one image with another using layers.

Finally, of course, all the basics are there – resize, crop, rotate, blur, and so on. Resizing works especially well, giving a much smoother result than lots of other graphics editors do. In the latest version, PSP tries hard to make everything it can ‘one step’ or ‘one click’, which is quite a relief to those of us who’ve been using it for a while – with each version, the program gets easier to learn and use as well as a little more powerful.

Logos and Navigation.

Paint Shop Pro excels when it comes to producing logos and navigation elements.

Its text tools let you produce smooth, anti-aliased text in your favourite font, and position it exactly the way you want to create a logo. You’d be surprised how many good effects you can get by rotating your text, and PSP has an excellent feature that lets you curve your text around any shape you want to.

When it comes to navigation, PSP’s font functions excel again: it’s dead easy to copy one navigation element as many times as you want and add different text to it each time, thanks to the program letting you edit text as much as you like even once it’s been placed into the image.

Producing Mockups.

I have to admit, though, that my favourite thing to use Paint Shop Pro for is producing mockups. It’s so easy to create the boxes and text that make up a web page, and paste it any images you might need. You can have an accurate image of your website ready within ten minutes or so, and save it in a format your web browser can view, so you can get a better idea of what it would look like ‘for real’.

Even better, once you come up with a mockup you like, you can select parts of it to save and use them in the final version, in whatever image format you want. Once you know a little CSS, you can do most of your design work in PSP, using HTML and CSS as the glue that holds your image-based site together.

Photoshop Plugins.

Finally, one of the most notable things about Paint Shop Pro is that it supports Photoshop’s plugins, giving you access to a lot of the features Photoshop users rely on without having to actually shell out for Photoshop. Of course, Paint Shop Pro has plenty of plugins of its own available too.

Where Can I Get Paint Shop Pro?

Paint Shop Pro used to be shareware sold by its creators, Jasc, but it’s now owned by Corel (www.corel.com). It sells for around $50, which is a lot cheaper than anything comparable on the market, yet it does everything that most users would ever want it to do – the most recent version even adds CMYK, a big reason why many people stayed with Photoshop. You may even already have a copy, as plenty of computers and scanners come bundled with it now. If you don’t, though, you can download a 30-day free trial from corel.com.

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If you’re like 90% of web users, then you use Internet Explorer, Microsoft’s web browser. Why? Well, because it comes with Windows, usually, and it’s there on your desktop when you first want to use the web. When you’re creating a website, however, you have to consider the other 10% of the web’s users – the ones who use alternative web browsers. If you don’t test your site in each one of these browsers, you might be in for a nasty surprise when a large part of the web can’t use it. Here’s a guide to the most common alternative web browsers.

Mozilla.

While Mozilla is a web browser itself, it is also an engine (Gecko) that powers a lot of other web browsers. The Gecko code is free and open-source, created by Netscape, and is currently Internet Explorer’s biggest competitor. It works on Windows, Mac, Linux, and almost everything else out there.

The advantage of Gecko is that if you’ve tested with one of the Mozilla browsers, your site should work on all of them. The Mozilla browsers include Mozilla Firefox, Netscape, Camino, Kmeleon, and lots of browsers for the Linux operating system. You’ll probably find it easiest to download Mozilla Firefox from getfirefox.com and test your website using that.

Opera.

Opera is, in many ways, the alternative alternative browser, for people who are too odd to even want to use a Mozilla browser. It’s very much a niche product, developed by a small Norwegian company, and many more technical users like it because of its constant innovation when it comes to features – anything you like in another web browser was probably available in Opera first. Opera is for Windows, Mac and Linux.

You can download a free version of Opera from opera.com. It has ads, but it’s perfectly fine for testing. If you like Opera enough to actually use it for your own web browsing, you can pay a one-time fee of around $40 to remove the ads.

Safari.

Safari is now the official Mac web browser, which means that it’s important to test on it if you want Macintosh users to be able to see your website. Unfortunately, Safari doesn’t run at all on Windows.

However, Safari uses the same engine as a browser called Konqueror, which can run on PCs on the Linux operating system. Linux is free, and you can easily download it, burn it to CD, and run it straight from the CD. Knoppix (www.knoppix.com) is a popular and easy to use kind of Linux for this purpose.

Alternatively, if you don’t want to mess around with a whole other operating system, you could try a service like BrowserCam (www.browsercam.com). They will load your website into many different browsers, and then send you pictures of it to let you see if there are any problems that need to be fixed. Because of the bandwidth and the number of computers that have to be involved, though, most of these services aren’t free.

Lynx.

Lynx works on a lot of very esoteric operating systems, but works fine on Windows too. It’s a text-only browser, and it pays no attention to layout or graphics. You can download Lynx at lynx.browser.org.

Why would anyone want that, you wonder? Well, Lynx is mostly popular among blind people who use screen-readers to turn web pages into speech. How well your web page works in Lynx is often considered is often considered to be a test of how accessible it is to anyone with disabilities, as well as to anyone who turns off things like Javascript in their browser settings.

The very worst sites will come back with a message telling users to download a supported browser when they’re visited in Lynx – never do this. You should be aiming to make sure that Lynx users can see a basic, text-only version of your site, with easy-to-use navigation. If your site doesn’t support this, then it’s probably breaking all sorts of disability discrimination laws, and you should fix it as soon as you can.

For more information, you might like to visit the Viewable with Any Browser Campaign at www.anybrowser.org/campaign.

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Before you can start a website, you need to come up with a domain name. The domain name is the name of your site on the web – the ‘www.yourname.com’ that people will type in their browsers and see at the top of every page of your website. Obviously, it’s important to choose a good one.

Not Just Dot Com.

Many people don’t realise, but the web has a lot more to offer than just .com addresses. .com is primarily intended for companies (the ‘com’ is short for ‘commercial’) – alternatives include .org (organisations) and .net (intended for Internet service providers). There are also kinds of domains that you can’t get for yourself, including .edu (educational institutions) and .gov (government departments). In most cases, you should be looking at .com if you’re a ‘real’ company selling physical products, .org if you’re non-profit, and .net if you’re web-only – but if you can get a good .com, it’s often worth having just for the prestige and recognition factor.

There are some addresses that have been made available more recently, such as .name (for individuals) and .biz (for companies). They aren’t yet well-recognised, though, and both seem like a bit of a joke – asking customers to go to yourname.biz to get to your business website just makes you sound dodgy, so you should avoid it for now. You should also look out for fake domains like .shop and .free, which are sold at some places but won’t be accessible by most of the Internet.

On top of all that, each country gets its own code, and is free to divide it further how it sees fit. The United Kingdom, for example, owns .uk, and has divided it into .co.uk (companies), .org.uk (non-profit), and .me.uk (individuals), as well as a few non-public areas like .ac.uk (academic) and .gov.uk (government). If you want people to know where in the world you are, or you can’t get the .com name you want, a country address is a good alternative.

Choosing a Name.

Domain names aren’t at all expensive any more, but millions of them are already taken – it can feel very difficult to come up with one for your website. Here are some tips:

First of all, give up on any single word that can be found in a dictionary. There are people monitoring these domains constantly and buying them the moment they become available. It’s also not really worth trying anything under four letters long, especially under .com, because you’re deeply unlikely to find one.

The best thing to do is to come up with a series of three words or so that describes your website. You’ll need to think around this problem. If you’re registering a business website, you might want to include something in the domain to distinguish it from other businesses with the same name – the town where you’re based, for example.

If you want to get ranked high in search engines, it’s worth considering what your potential customers would be searching for when you’re registering your domain name.

If you’re trying to register your own name, then you might just be plain out of luck. Look at every kind of address you can think of. One common trick is to register a domain in a country where you don’t actually live, and use the last two letters as part of the domain – Robert Smith, for example, might register robertsmi.th, even though .th belongs to Thailand.

Finding a Registrar.

Once you’ve made a list of domains you’re happy with, the next step is finding a registrar: godaddy.com, namecheap.com and registerfly.com are some of the cheapest out there right now. Really, anything over $10 per domain is a rip off – shop around.

When you type your chosen domains into a registrar’s search box, they will tell you whether or not each domain is available, and how much it would cost. Prepared to be surprised by some of the truly obscure names that are already taken, but don’t give up.

Finally, when you’re registering your domain, make sure to put in genuine contact details, as it can be taken away from you if you don’t. You should also remember the username and password you use, as you will need them before you can point that domain to your website.

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When it comes to accepting online payments and other sensitive information over the web, normal HTTP just doesn’t cut it. It’s an insecure method of communication where everything is sent over the wire in cleartext – it’s completely trivial for anyone in a network administrator position at a business or ISP to gain access to the network, and most networks are even vulnerable to ’sniffing’ by non-privileged users of the network.

Things are bad enough that you really shouldn’t even transmit any passwords without taking additional security measures, unless the things the passwords give access to are entirely trivial – put simply, as a webmaster, you need to be worried about encryption and security. But how can you add them to your website? Well, it’s not as difficult as you think, because there’s a standardised way of doing it: SSL.

What is SSL?

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer. It is a method of using cryptography to make sure that communication between a server and a client is secure: in other words, data sent can’t be intercepted or tampered with in any way. SSL works using a variety of encryption methods, but the most important feature is that SSL certificates effectively certify that a site is the real thing, which helps to prevent spoofing. When SSL is combined with HTTP, it becomes HTTPS (Secure HTTP), a powerful way for web browsers and web servers to send sensitive data back and forward securely.

If all that was over your head, maybe I should put it to you in the way that your customers will. SSL is what makes their web browser come up with the little padlock symbol that means your website is secure for them to enter sensitive information into. If there’s no padlock, they don’t want to do business with you.

However, you should also be aware of what SSL is not: it isn’t a complete security package. If you transmit data over HTTPS and then store it in a database unencrypted when it reaches your server, someone with access to the database will still be able to easily retrieve the data. SSL is not the answer to everything – it’s simply a way of avoiding anything happening to the data while it’s ‘out there’, travelling across the Internet. Of course, your customers are unlikely to realise that (they think the padlock works like magic), but you at least should.

Levels of Encryption.

There are three main levels of SSL encryption: 40-bit, 128-bit and 256-bit.

It’s very important to emphasise at this point that 40-bit SSL is now outdated and deprecated: you would be a fool to use it. The only reason 40-bit encryption was available to begin with was because the US government was initially afraid of exporting cryptographic algorithms that were strong enough to be used against them: 40-bit was strong enough for most web uses, but still weak enough that they could break it by brute force with their powerful computers. The US was persuaded to relax the restrictions when the government realised that they were doing nothing but forcing IT development to other countries, but by then there had been widespread adoption of 40-bit encryption.

Now, years later, there’s really no reason to be using it. You should go for 128-bit as a minimum, and preferably 256-bit – what you can afford will likely be dictated by the value of the goods you sell. If you think anyone is likely to try to break your encryption, you should get the best you can.

How Do I Use SSL?

If your web host supports SSL, then it should already be all set up for you (if you host your website yourself, then you might like to take a look at the tutorials at modssl.org to get it installed). However, before you can use SSL, you need to get certified – that is, buy an SSL certificate from one of the trusted certificate authorities. The big three are VeriSign, GeoTrust and Thawte, but they charge relatively high prices.

The whole thing works more-or-less the same way as buying a domain name, and, in fact, many domain registrars resell certificates – you can often get a better deal from them than you would from one of the big companies. You can often find perfectly good certificates for as little as $30 per year, if you shop around.

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Many people think the Internet and the web are the same thing. In fact, the Internet is simply a global network of computers – the web runs on top of the Internet, and makes it useful for us. So how does the web work?

The Invention of the Web.

The web was invented by a man named Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 – that’s 20 years after the start of the Internet. People had been trying to work out effective ways of sending information around on the Internet for a while at that point (email was invented in 1971, for example), but there hadn’t been any systems that had really harnessed the net’s potential.

The web changed everything. Berners-Lee’s big idea was to apply the idea of links to the Internet: the web would be a mass of pages that you could move between by clicking on links. He came up with a format for these pages (HTML), and wrote the first web browser to view them with, as well as the first web server for sending them to other people’s web browsers.

Links might not seem like much now, but at the time they were revolutionary. Imagine what the web would be like if you had to keep typing long addresses every time you wanted to move from one page to the next, or using long numbered menu systems that work differently from one site to the next. Without the web, having Internet access would be pretty useless.

Servers and Browsers.

Any time you use a web browser (like Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox), you’re using the web. How? Well, it works like this:

1. You open your web browser, and it goes to your home page. From there, you can click links to other websites, or to other parts of the same website. If your home page is a search engine, then you can type in a search and click links in the search results. If you know the address of a site you want to go to, you can type it in, and then click more links from there to keep going.

2. Each time you click a link, your browser looks at two things about it: the name of the web server it links to, and the name of the page it links to on that server. For example, the address ‘http://www.example.com/mypage.html’ tells the web browser to get the page called mypage.html from the server at www.example.com, using HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol). This server is a real computer, connected to the Internet, that has the page you want to read stored on its hard disk.

3. To find out where this server is, your web browser looks it up using DNS (Domain Name System), which turns the text address into a number. This IP (Internet Protocol) address consists of four numbers between 0 and 255 – it looks like a phone number. The Internet is set up to make it easy to find a server anywhere in the world once you know its IP address, and it can easily find the quickest route from your ISP (Internet Service Provider) to the server, and establish communication. This whole process, from DNS lookup to connection, will often take much less than a second.

4. Your web browser then sends an HTTP request to that web server, and the web server responds by sending back the HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) code for that page. Your web browser turns this code into a page that you can view. From there, you can click more links to start the process over again.

Of course, all this is quite simplified: modern browsers and servers send around much more than HTML code. You can use the web to download anything now, from pictures to programs, but it all works in basically the same way.

If something goes wrong somewhere in this process, then you’ll get an error: ‘the page cannot be displayed’, for example, usually means that the server’s name was wrong, or that it doesn’t have the page you wanted. You might also see errors saying that the server is currently too busy with other people’s requests to respond, or that the page you wanted has moved. In each case, the best thing to do is to follow the instructions on the error page, which usually means checking the address and trying again.

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As you travel around the web, you’ll notice that most sites now have ads in some form or another. Some of them are subtle, but some of them just aren’t – in fact, after a while, the ads at some sites can annoy you enough that you’ll either block them out entirely or leave the website. This isn’t good for you, and it isn’t good for the site’s owner – which is why you want to avoid the problem or your website.

Basically, you probably want to run ads, but you don’t want to drive your visitors crazy doing it. That’s why you should avoid all the following kinds of ads.

Pop-ups and Pop-unders.

The classic annoying ads are pop-ups: those ads that open a new browser window to display, and force you to close them before you can continue. Pop-unders are a variation, that pop up behind the website so the user sees them when they close their browser – not only annoying, but also quite confusing for them.

People are annoyed enough by pop-ups to actually buy dedicated pop-up blocking software, and browsers eventually started including it as a built-in feature. This means that pop-up ads now bother only the most unsophisticated of users who don’t upgrade their software, generally a minority of your site’s audience – pop-ups just aren’t as profitable as they used to be, so there’s no point in annoying people with them any more.

Floating Ads and Takeovers.

The rise of pop-up blocking software has meant that pop-ups have effectively been replaced by floating ads and website ‘takeovers’ – that is, ads created using Flash that appear over the top of the page you’re viewing, covering up its content. These ads are even more annoying than pop-ups, because they usually don’t come up with a close button for a few seconds after they appear, and missing it slightly can cause the advertiser’s site to appear. Users will often stop going to sites that make use of takeovers.

Interstitials.

Interstitials are a popular form of high-revenue advertising. The basic principle is that an ad is displayed on a full-page before the content, and then the user has to click through from there to get to the page they want. This, understandably, annoys users who just want some information – it mainly only works on sites where you have something to offer that others don’t, like an exclusive story or a video. Used well, they can be a big money-spinner, but used badly they’ll have people reaching for the back button.

If you do use interstitials, make sure you don’t track them using cookies, as this will cause users with cookies disabled to see the ad far more times than they should. You should also use Javascript to make sure that the ad disappears automatically and quickly, without the user having to click through – this makes them far less annoying.

Animated Ads.

Part of the reason that animated GIFs have become popular on the web is their overuse in advertising. At its worst, this results in ads that cycle rapidly through hundreds of colours, garish flashing text, and even ads that appear to vibrate or otherwise move around to draw attention to themselves. As you can imagine, visitors find this distracting and infuriating when they’re trying to concentrate on your site – resulting in them losing interest and clicking their back button.

Modern animated ads that use Flash can even have sound, although this is quite rare, as even the advertisers don’t want to annoy people that much. Anyway, avoid.

Products to Avoid.

Finally, it’s worth noting a few specific products that you should avoid running ads for, simply because the actual content of the ads themselves. Try to stay away from ads that look like fake system error messages, as non-technical users find these frightening and technical users find them deceitful. It’s also worth staying away from those fake competition ads where everyone wins, and ads that are aiming to get your visitors to install ’spyware’ on their computer and send private data to them – conning your visitors into this kind of thing is unethical, and makes them less likely to come back to your site ever again.

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Before you can consider the finer points of your design, you need to make the big decisions. Few of these decisions are more important than what colour scheme your website is going to use. If you choose the wrong one, your site will be, in the worst cases, completely unreadable.

Pay Attention to Contrast.

First of all, before you do anything else, you need to check that the colours you’ve chosen provide enough contrast for your text to be readable. Don’t put orange text on a yellow background, or red on blue, or anything like that. You should especially avoid using a lighter version of a colour on top of a darker version of that same colour, or vice versa. You’ve got to make sure that your text is readable.

Never Use Black Backgrounds.

You can generally use whatever colours you like as part of your colour scheme, but stay away from black backgrounds. It makes your website look ‘underground’ and threatening, not to mention old-fashioned. The only people who will like it will be dyed-in-the-wool computer nerds and people who get headaches from large areas of white.

Not Too Many Colours.

You should choose three or four colours for your site, and use only those colours (or shades of those colours). You can’t go using the whole rainbow without the design looking garish, and garish is never good. Decide ahead of time which three or four colours you’re going to use, and stick to it – if you want to add one, you have to drop one of the ones you’ve already got.

Complementary Colours.

These are colours that are opposite each other on a colour wheel, and so look good together, at least according to colour theory. The three most common sets are red-green; blue-orange, and yellow-purple. Whether you agree with this or not is up to you, but it can work surprisingly well, especially if you use subtle shades of the colours.

This is also a good way to pick colours that will be easily readable against a certain background: look for the exact opposite colour to maximise readability.

Analog Colours.

Another approach to try is to pick colours that are similar to your main colour, meaning that they’re near to it on the colour wheel. Red, for example, goes well with its analog colours, orange and yellow. Overdone, this can make your site look overly bright, but it can look good with restraint. It’s no coincidence that these combinations often occur in nature.

Chromatic Colours.

My personal favourite technique is to use colours chromatically. You use different shades and hues of one colour in your design, and nothing else apart from black and white – for example, you might use light blue, bright blue and dark blue together. This creates a sleek, professional look, and comes highly recommended.

Take Colours from Nature.

If you’re lacking inspiration for a colour scheme, one of the best things you can do is go for a walk outside. Take a look around at plants, flowers and animals. I once based an entire design on a photograph I took of a cat, and it turned out far better than I would ever have expected. Nature knows how to use colours better than you do – learn from it.

Colour Blindness.

Finally, it’s worth dropping in a note here about colour blindness. Try to make sure that your design uses colour to make itself aesthetically pleasing, but doesn’t rely on it for anything essential. You wouldn’t believe the statistics for the prevalence of colour blindness (some say as high as 10% are at least partially colour blind), and you need to consider these people too when you’re designing your site – they’re at least as important as the people with unusual browsers, for example.

You might like to take a look at your site using www.vischeck.com, which will let you see things the way a colour blind user would. Make sure they can at least still read your text!

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