Choosing Colours Schemes When You Create a Web Page.

A good colour scheme is important to the look and feel of your web pages.

When you create web page part of the initial design process is colour selection. Choosing good colours is very important. The visual aspect of a web site is the first thing that we notice. If it is garish, very bright, difficult to look at or just plain nasty that has an effect on our opinion of the site.

Colours are important for several reasons:

They should complement the look and feel of the web pages.
They should be part of the web page as a background to the content, not stand out above it.
They should make it easier to view the site.

Different colours can have different effects on people. For instance Red is a violent colour and can instil anger. Blues and greens are tranquil and can instil calm and serenity. Pale pastel colours are much easier to push into the background than strong, bright in your face colour schemes.

When using colours it is preferable to try and select similar shades and to only use two or three different colours. A mixture of blues or greens with another pale colour works well.

The colour red is excellent for headlines that make an impact but should be used very sparingly and diffused with calmer, more tranquil colours.

Try and avoid graphical or busy backgrounds. If you want to create fancy backgrounds keep them simple so they don’t over power the web pages. Generally just using normal colours is sufficient. You can use a strong, dark background for the page and put another paler or lighter colour on top as a background to your tables. This works really well.

A lot of people favour plain white and although this does inspire specific emotions, especially when used with text of various colours, it can be difficult for some people to read. In most cases blues and greens are the best for anyone who may have any kind of visual condition.

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© Tim Guy Intrepreuner IT

Adsense Templates and PLR Articles.

Are they worth it?

We’re seeing the same scenario repeatedly lately. Loads of downloads for adsense ready templates or template based websites and PLR articles for content.

Now both of these things are useful but you shouldn’t have to pay for them, there are plenty of places where you can get them for free.

In most cases everything we see is unlimited so you have to spend time making changes so that your web site and content becomes unique. What you are not told is that Google really doesn’t like similar or identical web sites. They just don’t index them. In the case of the latest adsense templates and web sites they are developed in php which is difficult at best to change or adjust and if you have no knowledge then it is almost impossible and extremely frustrating.

I would say that PLR articles probably are worth it as long as they are free but you can download perfectly good articles from the numerous article sites that work just as well and are probably less frequent on the internet.

But for me personally I’m not sure its worth downloading templates fro adsense which you then have to adjust when it’s actually ridiculously easy to create a web page template of your own that you can then use for all of your articles. You then make it totally unique and enhance the look and feel of your web site.

Check out the tutorial to create an article page template.

© Tim Guy Intrepreuner IT

How to Create Rollover Buttons.

Creating rollover buttons is very simple but highly effective and the finished product can look stunning if you select the right colour combinations.

Create a new folder on your hard drive and call it buttons then create another folder inside the buttons folder and call it gifs.

Open up your art package and create a new document of 150 pixels by 40 pixels.

Choose a dark fill colour and fill the image. If you are using software that can work with layers then ensure your text goes onto a new layer. Some packages do it automatically others you have to do it manually. If you can’t use layers then don’t worry this will still work.

Select your text tool, choose a light colour and type in the name of your web page starting with HOME (you don’t have to use capitals). Save the button in your art packages native format i.e. acd, psd, cpt, psp, in the buttons folder and then also as a gif in the gifs folder.

The reason to save the buttons in two formats is to save you work. Once you have created one and saved it in the art packages native format you don’t need to create anymore. You can use the same button and change the colours and the text then save it with a different name i.e.button 2, button 3 etc….

Now you need to make the second button to create the rollover effect. All you need to do to achieve this is swap the two original colours around. So the background becomes the text colour and vice versa. Save the new button in native format as button 2 in the button folder and as a gif in the gifs folder.

Now that you have created the two buttons for the rollover effect all you need to change is the text on each button to correspond to the web page it links to and save as gifs.

Save the gif buttons with the names of the web pages they will link to Home Button 1, Home Button 2 etc…

Hey presto instant rollover buttons.

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© Tim Guy Intrepreuner IT

Adding Images and Graphics to your Web Page.

The best formats to use for web page images are jpeg’s or jpg’s and gifs. These are the standard format of most images you’ll see on web sites. The reason for this is because they are small and load very easily so your web page will be on view very quickly.

Note: This is an often ignored concept of web design. In general most people will not wait more than ten seconds for a web page to load. If your web page takes too long they’ll be off somewhere else and will probably never return. But as long as they see something happening and it doesn’t take too long they wait a few seconds.

Gifs and jpegs are readily available all over the internet. In general terms a jpeg is a photograph and a gif is a drawn or generated image. There exceptions to the rule but saving a photograph as a gif is generally best avoided as the quality suffers but sometimes it is better to save a generated image as a gif. It all depends on the image.

If you are not working with jpegs and gifs then you will need to convert your images to the correct format. There are lots of free image software packages available for download from a multitude of web sites. ACDC seems to me one of the top packages but there are many to choose from and you should look for one you are confident with using.

Alternatively you can purchase software. Paint Shop Pro is fairly inexpensive but in my experience is cumbersome and overly complicated. Corel photopaint works very well. Fireworks is a nice package and is specially developed for the purpose of web design. Likewise Freehand is better suited to web design. And then there is the daddy of them all; Photoshop. Prices vary and unless you are seriously considering web design as a future mode of employment a free or cheap software package will perform very nicely.

Using graphics on your web page is fairly simple. Most web design packages give easy options for adding them wherever you want on your web page. The only real hard and fast rule is place a header graphic at the top of your web page and this is standard practice. Although you could just use a written text header images look so much nicer and more professional.

So think about the design of your page and consider where you wish to place your graphics then try it out. If it doesn’t look right then change it around until you are happy with the look and feel of your images on your web page.

Note: One word of warning, avoid animated gifs on your web page. They are out dated and will look like they are. All you will do is make your page look old fashioned and clunky. The only form of animation you should consider on your web page is flash. You can get some flash software packages very reasonably priced and they are not too difficult to use. But please, in no uncertain terms use any kind of animated gifs.

© Tim Guy Intrepreuner IT

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Create a Web Page.

To create a web page is actually quite a simple process. You need to consider a colour scheme and the elements you wish the page to contain (menu, information, banners, ads, links etc….). Then you need to consider the actual look of the page itself and where you want to place everything on the page. When you create a web page in this way its often easier to make a sketch before you actually start to build the web page with your chosen software.

The easiest way to create a web page is to use a template. Either adjust a pre-existing one or create your own. You can use tables to hold the elements and content you wish to place on the page; using a separate table for each element. In this way you can easily build up a page with the knowledge of where everything is going to go before you place anything in it. Once you’ve created a template it can be used for every page you wish to create.

The first thing you want is a background. Just a simple colour is enough but you can use whatever you wish. It is however good advice to steer away from anything too bright or distracting, it is just the background to the page and you don’t want it to detract from the content.

Next you want an outer table of one column and three or four rows. Make it between 800 and 900 pixels wide. I usually go for 800. You can always adjust it later if you need to.

Header Goes Here

You can put another table here if you want a top menu. Just use one or two rows and however many columns you have pages to link to.

This would be used for a side menu. You could just as easily put it on the right of the page. This is where you place your main content. This could be used for some sort of advertising and again could just as easily go on the left of the page.

In the top row you place your header graphic. In the next row you can place a page menu linking to other pages on your site or you can leave it blank and use a side menu. If you choose a side menu then you need to place another table of one row and three columns in the third row down. Make this table the same width as the original, so in my case it would 800 pixels.

This new table will contain your menu in the left or right column and your actual page content in the middle. The remaining column can be used for adverts; for either your own content or for someone else’s i.e. affiliate programs, adsense etc…

You can adjust the size of the individual columns so that they remain the same size on every page you create using the template. This helps with uniformity and the general look of the website. Generally you want the left and right columns to be around 150 pixels wide which leaves 500 pixels for the centre column.

The remaining row at the bottom can be left blank or used for links to other sites, a banner, contact info, anything you want really so long as it doesn’t detract form the main page content.

So you can see how easy it can be to create a web page template and then use it to create all of your web pages. It saves a lot of time and extra work and adds uniformity to your website.

I will right a few articles specific to different software that I will post on the site at Intrepreuner IT.

© Tim Guy Intrepreuner IT