Tip #3 -- Website Colors and Color Schemes

Now since you decided the structure of your website, and your text content, it’s time to decide your website colors. Website colors are just as important as designing your site and choosing text and image content. Below are a few images of the free website templates we have available to download; each site design and color scheme influences different moods and emotional responses by visitors. Website color scheme has been proven to stimulate appetites, provide energetic moods, and (most importantly for businesses) create an atmosphere of comfort and willingness to purchase an offered product.

Common Colors and the Affects

Red

Red is one of the most powerful and attention-getting colors. It has the ability to raise blood pressure (positively) and cause perspiration. Red reflects energy and can motivate an individual to take action. Depending on the sentence content, it can also symbolize warnings, violence, and aggression.

Pink

Pink is romantic, calming and feminine.

Orange

Orange is a vibrant color associated with autumn and Halloween (especially when depicted with black). Orange has been known to stimulate the appetite. It can also symbolize health.

Yellow

Yellow represents sunshine and warmth. It can signify hope, light and energy. Due to yellow’s brightness, it is not often used with website backgrounds nor text color. Yellow is normally included within images and banner advertisements.

Green

Green signifies health and growth (vegetation) and wealth (money). For business sites (such as the Black Business Bureau) green represents confidence and assuring of any offered product.

Blue

Blue is one of the most soothing colors and is associated with the sky and the sea. It is considered to be a "safe" color and signifies intelligence, reassurance, and trust. Blue has also been known to be an appetite suppressant (good for restaurants to know!).

Purple

Purple symbolizes creativity. Purple is spiritual and mysterious. Deep purple is associated with royalty and richness while lavender is associated with romance.

Black

Black can represent power, elegance, and sophistication, but sometimes in western cultures it can represent death, anger and sadness.

White

White represents cleanliness and purity in western culture, but it represents death in Eastern cultures. With websites, white provides an emotionless feeling. Usually sites with a lot of information will use white to give their information content more attention. Most websites will usually mix white with other colors to offset the dullness that white presents.

Grey

Grey is the combination of black and white. It is a conservative color. Grey can symbolize security, maturity and reliability, but it can also signify gloominess and sadness.

Brown

We like to classify brown as a "special" color. Brown represents credibility and stability; an earth color.

Colors All Around Us

Take a moment to browse the Black Business Bureau site and see how we use our color schemes. browse other sites and notice their color and their content. Take notes and use that information to better your website!

Tip #2 -- Text Alignment on Your Website

Thanks for coming to read the Black Business Bureau’s second tip on website design and development. This time we’ll briefly address text alignment with websites, because even something as simple as word choice and text alignment makes huge differences in determining site traffic (the amount of visitors to your site) and returning visitors to your site.

1) Aligned Left:
Aligning your text to the left is usually common for most websites. There isn’t a special feature or reason to align your page content to the left other than simple appeal to your visitors.

This is a text aligned to the left

2) Aligned Right:
Right alignments are usually used for pictures. It is very rare to align your words to the right of your page, simply because people read from left to right. The only time a right alignment of text is used is for placing copyright information or mentioning your name to a particular service or product.

This is a text aligned to the right

3) Centered:
Centered alignments are common for attention getters. When a text is centered it is usually a title or a special announcement that you (the website developer) want your visitors to see.

For Example:
Take a look at the top of this page; notice the Black Business Bureau Website Development title as well as the topic of discussion (Tip 2 – Text Alignment)

This centered text is used to capture your attention…
Did it capture your attentions?

4) Justified:
Justified Alignments are used almost as frequent as a left aligned text. Justified aligned text gives a professional image to your website. BE CAREFUL, depending on the length of your text, justified text alignments can cause your words to be very far apart, which gives an amateur or unprofessional look to your site. In many occassions, justified text alignment looks very similar to left alignment.

For Example:

This text is justified; it almost looks like a left aligned text. The difference is that the words are spaced evenly whereas a left aligned text would clutter the words to the right side of the screen.

Now since we spoke about alignment, lets discuss actual fonts. With websites different browsers have different settings. Your website which may look great in web browsers like Firefox may look horrible in web browsers like Internet Explorer. For readable text in websites, you should stick with basic fonts such as:

· Times New Roman

· Arial

· Verdana

· Trebuchet MS

· Tahoma

· Microsoft Sans Serif

Fancy fonts should be used for word processors and other document processing software but not for websites. Here are a few examples of faulty text:

Times New Roman – Black Business Bureau

Algerian – Black Business Bureau

Edwardian Script ITC– Black Business Bureau

Arial – Black Business Bureau

Book Antiqua– Black Business Bureau

Verdana – Black Business Bureau

Trebuchet MS – Black Business Bureau

Tahoma – Black Business Bureau

Bookman Old Style – Black Business Bureau

You can experiment with several different fonts and how they will look on your website. To begin testing and using fonts and formatting your design, please download a free website editor, or purchase one with the Black Business Bureau.

FREE Website Editors Buy Dreamweaver 8

Tip 3 - Website Color Schemes


This information was proudly presented by

The Black Business Bureau's website development staff

Website Tip #1 -- Site Design

Website Design Strategies

Black Business Bureau Webmasters


Tip 1 - Site Design

Now, let’s briefly talk about website design in a very simplistic way. It is very important that we start out with very simple and basic advice for all those new to web design and development.


Several websites are not prepared as they should be. Many sites are lacking necessary style, text alignment and formation. Sites with lacking features gives your business a lacking image.


Websites like:

does not impress your customers. It has an unprofessional look; moreover it gives an impression that you don't care enough about your own services to make your products worth using. We (the Black Business Bureau website staff) would not recommend advertising this website to anyone you wish to present your services to.

This is important to mention because several Black owned businesses have websites that look like this or of a similar quality.

The first step in website creation is deciding what you want your website to look like.

Simple right?

Sorry, not really.
But take a deep breath; it's not as hard as you might think!

Brain storm ideas about what you want your website to look like. Think about link location, banners, and most importantly content!


Draft your ideas on paper and write what you want your message to be on different web pages.





For Example:






















If this was your home page, what would you want your opening message to be?


Make your messages original. Catchy sales pitches do not work well when trying to attrack customers to your site. People are more likely to revisit your site if they feel comfortable and believe that they are on a website created by a genuine person; not a salesman or corporate hustler. Businesses have a tough role because while the business home page should contain a professional message, certain links within your website should contain content which makes the business personable. Businesses like hair care saloons should have content which can help visitors see your hard working staff as well as some advice on hair care. In the example above (Marcus's Ice Cream Express Inc.) Marcus should include pictures of himself serving ice cream, the delight and responses of his customers, and even a professional picture of himself smiling, in his ice cream uniform (if applicable).



Brainstorm ideas about colors for your site and visuals such as pictures, videos, and even music! Make sure you have a clear idea about what you want your website to look like. Visualize it. See it; then start the process to create it. Have each draft page labeled what you want that page to be:


For Example:


Home Page -- (have your design and content for the home page)

Contact Page-- (have your design and content for the contact page)
About Us Page-- (have your design and content for the about us page)
Service Page-- (have your design and content for the service page)


If you need brainstorming ideas for developing your website, you have two options:


1) Check out the MILLIONS of websites on the internet. Use search engines to find other websites that share similar business, organization or even ideas. Check out their website; is there anything that you see that you like??? Include it in your hand drawn design!



2) The Black Business Bureau is finding website templates for our visitors that you can use. Choose a Free website template and start creating your website today!

Free Website Templates

This information was proudly presented by
The Black Business Bureau's website development staff