Web Design – Choosing the right colour scheme

Picking the right color scheme can be a difficult phase of the design process. Color schemes can make or break a site. The colors you choose will help convey the overall mood of a site and how you use them will call attention to key areas on your pages. Websites keep their colors for a long time between web designs, so make sure to choose the best possible scheme by using the tips and tools below

Working with text
Text is the most important element on your site. If someone cannot read your site then it serves him or her no purpose and they will leave. Whether it is the text in your navigation or your body text, select colors that contrast so that text is readable. A standard choice is to use dark text over a light background. Most people are used to this since print on has gone this way for ages. Of course this is web design and we are not constrained to the styles of print media and are free to choose a dark scheme if it fits our site

The following example shows how a dark design can work. Navigation elements have a slightly lower contrast to bring out the white text from the background. Also the opposing color of red also points out the focus of this particular website.

The example below shows what not to do with text both in the navigation and the body. The text on bottles is inconsistent and difficult to read on. The body text is made of the two worst possible colors for the background. The yellow text also doesn’t contrast well against the bottles in the background image.

Figure 1 Poor colors for text over a blue background

Choosing the Colors

Once upon a time web design was limited to the 216-color web safe color palette, but current browsers allow nearly all colors to be rendered. Just because you can use any color doesn’t mean you should. Try and work with a light background and dark foreground colors. With the background making 50% or more of your site this is the color that will set the tone. But don’t be afraid to invert this color scheme if it fits your sites purpose.

Look at your logo

Your logo is a good starting point for choosing the colors for your site. Experiment with contrasting colors to help the logo stand out. You can also use the colors of your logo to become colors of various elements in your website. The image below from FedEx is a good example of this. The purple from the logo highlights the active navigation and the services section of the website pointing out what the customer will gain most from this area. The light grey also takes a role here as trim and for navigation and elements like the scroll bars.

Figure 2 FedEx logo colors as highlight

Tools for color selection

There is no end to how many possible color combinations can be made. A good rule of thumb is if you are working with more than 5 colors for your website you are going overboard. Tools such as Color Scheme Designer, and Adobe’s Kuler project allow you to experiment with colors using the following rules.

• Complementary – colors which are colors opposite to each other on a color wheel
• Analog  - colors that are located right beside each other on a color wheel
• Monochromatic  - colors or different shades of the same color
• Triad or Tetrad – 3 or 4 colors equally spaced around a color wheel

There are more color theory rules than I listed here but those are the most popular choices.

Both tools allow you to look at schemes from other designers and export your created color palettes to formats useable in GIMP or PhotoShop. Adobes Kuler web app also adds many social aspects to the color selection game. There is the color wheel showing the popularity of colors other designers are using, and forums to discuss current work being done from Kuler.

There are many web applications for creating color schemes available that work on all platforms. These are just two popular examples. I’ve listed a few more here for you to explore for your self:

• Color Schemer(http://www.colorschemer.com/) – Online gallery swatches from other designers, and discussion forums.
• Color Blender(http://colorblender.com/) – Simple tool with RGB/HSV sliders and simple export functions
• Visibone Color Lab(http://www.visibone.com/colorlab/) – Basic color selection tool using only the 216-color web safe palette
• Color Theory(http://colortheory.liquisoft.com/) – Not a tool like the others but it is a good site to get some basic understanding of color theories mentioned here in this article.

This article was courtesy of:
Lawrence Hall , Community Manager Go-Gulf , a Dubai based web design company that provides web development solution in the middle east.

How to Start Your Own Hosting Company

Web hosting is undoubtedly one of the most lucrative online businesses which will yield recurring benefits to you on a long run. Therefore, let us get straight to the point,” How to start your own hosting company?”
Let us first analyze about which type of people who can enter into the web hosting business. The answer is, just about anyone and everyone. You can start your own hosting company in a lot of different ways depending upon your expertise and your budget. Adding the web hosting profile to your existing business is most definitely a good strategy for your business expansion.

If you are marketing any Internet service provider company or if you are into computer repairing business, starting your own web hosting company will be the next level of growth for your company. You will be coming across frequent inquiries about the websites from your existing clients. All you’ll need to do is, do the up-selling to your existing customers. The platform is perfectly suitable for your business growth.

You might have already noticed that the well established hosting companies give out their blogs for free. Anybody can register for free and set up their blogs with those companies. These companies generate huge revenues from the advertisements.
Let us try to distinguish between the various options to start your own web hosting company. If you are a beginner with a shoestring budget, you could go for the web hosting with the reselling packages from the big hosting companies. Your customers will get a feeling that the web hosting is done by your company.

The plus point is that you will not have to worry about investing on the servers, technical problems, tax issues and other terms and conditions which come along with the hosting business.

You cannot stop at this level if you want to start your own hosting company and more importantly grow it. The clients can easily know about the name servers and realize that you are the reseller. The chances are that they might not renew their hosting packages with you unless you impress them with your excellent customer support. You will need to grow out of this level at one stage in order to ensure the recurring income with the renewals every year.

Reaching for new horizons

You can opt to lease out the services of dedicated servers for your web hosting business. However, you will not be able to sustain it for long when your clientele grows. Setting up your own data center for your servers is the best possible option when a look at the bigger picture of your company’s growth. It is not just going to happen overnight and you will need to consider a lot of things along with the server space.

The efficient web hosting company will have excellent sales team, billing department and the technical department to handle the client issues. You’ll also need to think about uninterrupted power supply and other overhead costs like location rentals and the salary for the employees.

It is very easy to start your own web hosting company and you can make the necessary changes as your company grows. You will need to be patient and persistent with building your client network. When your clientele grows, you will surely see the next step.

Velnet Designs

Most good web designers are brilliant at designing new website, they are even better when it comes to giving advise to website owner when reviewing sites created by other web designers, but when their own website is put under the spotlight, the proverb “physician heal thyself” comes to mind. “physician heal thyself”  was the prescription when the website of a team of web designers called Velnet Designs was reviewed.

Velnet Designs website was put under microscope to see what aspect of it is good and what aspect can be improved.  The website colour scheme is excellent, the overwhelming colour used on the site is blue, with a hint of red in the site logo and a dash of red here and there. The site has two navigation menu, a horizontal navigation menu takes you to the top level contents such as web deign, logo design portfolio, enquiry form, contact form and about us for. The horizontal navigation take visitors to deep sections of the site. The two navigation menu works pretty well to make the site very easy to navigate.

The most important contents were laid in columns on the homepage, with deep links that take you to detailed page for each product, this works very well on the site, withing two clicks of the mouse you arrive at any of the important pages on the site.
At the bottom of Velnet Designs, a site map contain links to all the pages on this site, this provide a secondary navigation which strictly speaking is not  necessary giving how well the two principal navigation menu on the site works.

Despite the aforementioned plus, there are areas the site can improve, starting with the site map, it was not well created, it can be improved with a brief description of what to find on the page a link points to.  Velnet Design lacks a search facility, though the site is not that large, however a search facility will be an additional was to find information quickly on the website.  The free web design quote page which is the principal enquiry page for all their product could be improve to make requesting information from Velnet Design easier. The site also does not have and easy way of bookmarking nor does it use any of the social bookmarking tools that could potentially help to make the site popular in social bookmarking sites.