masterminds

Color is everywhere and conveys a message even if we don’t realize it. While this message can vary by culture it pays to know what colors “say” in your own corner of the universe, and even what color means to your target market.

If you don’t think that color speaks just complete this sentence, “red means ---- and green means –“ even a child will know what red means stop and green means go. If such simple ideas work for all of a given culture or market what could it mean to the graphic design of your website, brochure, or product if you know some of this information.

First let’s start with the basics. The color wheel. We’ve all seen it. The color wheel shows the basic colors, each wheel is different in how many shades of each color is shown, but they are essentially the same.

Color harmony, colors that go together well. These will be colors that are next door to each other on the color wheel. Such as blue and green. In reference to clothes these colors match each other. Instinctively most of us know which colors go together when we dress ourselves every morning.

Color complements, colors that set each other off, they complement each other. These are colors that are opposite on the color wheel. Such as blue and orange.

Color depth, colors can recede or jump forward. Remember that some colors seem to fall back such as blue, black, dark green, and brown. Other colors will seem to step forward such as white, yellow, red, and orange. This is why if you have a bright orange background it may seem to fight with any text or images that you place on it. The orange will always seem to move forward.

Now you have the basics so let’s go further. Just because to colors go together or complement each other doesn’t mean that yo necessarily want to use them on your project. I opened this article with the meaning of colors now here is an example, keep in mind this is one example from western culture.

Color Survey: what respondents said colors mean to them.

Happy = Yellow Inexpensive = Brown

Pure = White Powerful = Red (tomato)

Good Luck = green Dependable = Blue

Good tasting = Red (tomato) High Quality = Black

Dignity = Purple Nausea = Green

Technology = Silver Deity = White

Sexiness = Red (tomato) Bad Luck = Black

Mourning = Black Favorite color = Blue

Expensive = Gold Least favorite color = Orange

So in designing your project it’s important to know what colors mean. You can now see why a black back ground with green type would be bad, beyond being nearly impossible to read, if your target market thinks that black represents mourning and green makes them sick. There are exceptions to every rule of course.

So you may want to include some research in what colors mean to your target market. Colors that would get the attention of a teen would probably annoy an older person and the colors that appeal to the older person wouldn’t get a second look from a young person.

Color may be one of the most overlooked aspects of web design.

Have you ever come across a site that seemed to take forever to load? Did it only display the background, and minutes later, display the text all at once? By reading this article, you will be able to prevent this common mistake from happening to you.

Many people use tables to create an effective web site. Most do not bother creating new tables, just dividing the cells to place new content in. This may work for you if you have few or no images, but if your site has too many, this is one of the best ways to turn visitors away. If you have a "graphically intense" web site, you should use separate tables to split up your content. There are several reasons for this.

First, you should understand how a browser reads a table. In a regular HTML document, the browser will display text and images as they load. However, in a table, the browser waits for everything to load before the contents is displayed to the browser and the visitor. One large graphic in a table is all it takes to change your page load time from 15 seconds to 1 minute and 15 seconds. Therefore, you should break up your graphic if it is large and put it in separate tables with the border, cell spacing, and cell padding set to 0.

One way to break up your data is to create two tables- one at the top with the logo and any header information, and one at the bottom with the actual content. This will work well, as the visitor can see your logo and some options while waiting for your page to load. Another way is to actually make tables inside tables. The main table will load, displaying its contents while the tables inside it load. This will make your page load considerably faster and give the viewer something to read while the sub-tables are loading.

That is basically it- I strongly recommend using this technique to decrease page load time while increasing visitors. Before I let you on your own, though, let me remind you of one last thing: Do everything possible to avoid having to put a Java, Shockwave, or ActiveX program in a table. Use JavaScript instead, where possible, because it is much faster to load and execute. It's up to you now to build an effective web site. I hope the knowledge you just learned will help you through your journey. Good luck.

Web design services and software development services by einfy.com

Article by Venkat 

Do you want your site to load quickly? If it is your personal homepage, it may be a big deal to you. If you are trying to run a business, or offer people important information, this can be very important. If your front page takes a great deal of time to load into a browser, then you may want to do a little redesigning to increase the number of visitors that decide to stay at your site.

First, remember that not everyone has a T1, cable modem, or ISDN connection to the internet. In fact, there are still a large number of surfers with modems less than 56K. So, as web designers we must see to it that our sites load as quickly as possible without losing anything important.

Let's start with the obvious bandwidth hogs: images and other media. My suggestion here is to take out every form of multimedia embedded in you front page except for images. Sure, a background song can be nice, but these sound files can take up a great deal of bandwidth, especially if the sound is a .wav file. (I made a 30 second .wav on my computer- It came out around 140K). Videos can be even more taxing, (1 MB or more at times) and should probably be avoided unless absolutely necessary. As a surfer, if I have to wait more than 10 seconds for something like this to load, I'm tempted to hit "Stop" or "Back". So if you use these, keep the file sizes small (Probably 30-40K or less would be OK). Better yet, save them for a later page.

Your images will be your next big worry. These can also get quite large, so caution is necessary when dealing with images. For starters, do not make an image any larger than you need it to be for the effect you desire. If you have an image that is 600 pixels x 600 pixels, your page could take forever to load. One of the easiest ways to reduce the file size of your image is to simply give the image smaller dimensions. Go to your image editing program, and resize or resample your image to make it smaller. You can also compress your images using special services on the web which reduce the file size of images for you, and let you choose the images that still look good once they are compressed. There are links to an image program, an image rendering tutorial, and image file size reduction services at the bottom of the article for you.

After you have the images as compact as you can make them, you can save loading time on other pages by using one or more of the images from the front page on other pages. The image you loaded for the viewer on the front page will be in the browser's cache, and will load instantly when it is called on your other pages! This will allow you to load other things you may need without needing to worry about the image again.

Another trick you can use is to define the width and height in all of your image tags. This way, the browser knows how much space the image will use on the page, and will not have to adjust everything once the image starts loading. It will save a little time, and will also keep the page from jumping when an image loads.

Finally, be sure your front page is as short as possible as well. A longer page can take a long time to load, even if it is all text. Put extra information on another page and use a link for people to go view it. You will save a little extra time, and maybe reduce clutter a little bit.

Well, I am done thinking for today, maybe I'll have a few more speed tips for you in a future article. Until then, have fun with your speed enhanced web sites!

web development could be done by any software development company