I’ve been writing short articles for the Acalanes High School class; I thought I would repost this color article here for the adult program.

Any time you start to build a web site you need to determine who your audience will be. Do you have an international audience? Are they primarily male or female? What is the age group of your primary audience? Is your audience affluent or working class? Who are you trying to get to purchase your merchandise or services? Who are you trying to reach? When you’re developing the overall site design and the color scheme you must take your audience preferences into consideration. In fact your audience should drive the design of the site. While hot pink or neon green may be your favorite color, your target audience may not appreciate your vivid choice.

It’s important to research user preferences when developing a web site. Here are some resources on color preferences that will help you to create color schemes for the sites you develop:

Preferences - Favorite Color - discusses preferences by age group and gender. This is a good resource when you’re determining the color scheme for your web site. The Color Assignment web site is a great resource for learning more about color meanings and preferences. For example, orange is considered an appetite stimulant, we associate green with nature or money, and yellow may invoke caution. The Meaning of Colours is a wonderful color resource that discusses both color meaning and how different cultures perceive colors.

Once you determine a primary color you are going to use for your web site there are a variety of online color tools that you can use to develop a color scheme or palette for your web site. Lorelle on WordPress has the best list of color tools that I have found on the web. I really like the color blender; you can use this tool to create a nice palette of six colors.

Colors on web pages are usually identified by their hexadecimal value. For example, white is identified with the hex value of #ffffff, black is #000000, and blue is #0000ff. Look @ Wikipedia for a list of colors by color name, hexadecimal value, and RGB value.

Nature is another wonderful source of inspiration for color palettes. With a digital photo you can create a beautiful color palette using Photoshop.

Extra Resources:

Lorelle’s follow-up to this article

A GUIDE TO TOP COLOR COMBINATIONS IN WEB DESIGN Examples of Color Schemes and Color Combinations Within Designs - This is a really good article on color. Worth a read.

The use of colour - This article explains the use of colour, what colours signify, and how to find colours that fit with each other in your web pages. - added 6/29/06

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that we would be installed Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview on the instructor workstation. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen as quickly as I had planned. It is installed on the instructor workstation now, so have fun checking your sites in this new browser!

I am pleased to announce that free web hosting is now available to students who are currently enrolled in the ROP Technology Center’s Web Design Program. This hosting program will be available to you for the duration of your course. Hosting is only available to students who are currently enrolled in the Contra Costa ROP Web Design Program.

You can sign up for this free hosting program at http://www.robinshosting.com. Once you sign up for your account and it’s approved you will receive an email with important details about your account (FTP, webmail, CPanel, login info). Be sure to save the email instructions.

Your free account will be a subdomain of robinshosting.com. This means that the URL to your site will look like this: http://yourusername.robinshosting.com. I hope to have additional domain name choices in the future.

It is your responsibility to read all of the information presented on http://www.robinshosting.com including the terms of service and guides and resources.

If you need to update your customer contact information once your account is setup you can visit http://www.robinshosting.com/host/customer.php. You can also submit support tickets from the customer support area. I have setup a support forum for you to use to post questions and share tips with your fellow students.

I will be updating all of the class tutorials to reflect the new hosting information. Until then, the welcome email you received contains your FTP information so you can start uploading your files.

It’s the day we’ve all been waiting for! After five years without changes to the rendering engine that defines (and limits) what the Web can do, Microsoft has released IE7 Beta 2 Preview for download by developers everywhere.

If you have anything to do with the design and layout of a web site, you need to download this and get started on correcting any obvious compatibility issues.

Why the hurry, you ask? Well sure, there’s the fact that every Windows XP user in the world will be offered this browser as a free upgrade when it’s ready later this year. But more importantly in my mind is the fact that we have been clamouring for a less buggy, more standards-compliant browser from Microsoft for years. Now that Microsoft has finally responded, it’s up to us to show them they were right to do so.

Quoted from the SitePoint Times Email Newsletter. You can subscribe to these great newsletters @ SitePoint.

You can download (at home) and learn more about the beta release @ the Internet Explorer Beta 2 Preview Release Site. The IE Blog also has information on what is new with the release and other important notes about Internet Explorer improvements. Remember that this is a “beta” release, so there may be bugs, install with caution. I found a few issues when I went to install the beta version on my laptop:

1. After downloading the software and running the exe file your operating system installation needs to be validated before you can install. So information has to be sent to Microsoft.
2. I found that I couldn’t validate easily with Firefox. I ended up resetting my default browser to IE to validate.
3. I had to install an Active X control in order to validate and even then I got a validation error in IE.
4. I ignored the validation error in the browser and clicked Validate again in the install screen and it finally let me install the software.
5. Internet Explorer 6 will be replaced by this beta version, so only install if you’re ready to make the switch.

If you have already developed “live” web sites may want to download this preview release. Since the IE team has promised that they have fixed many of Internet Explorer bugs, you need to check your sites to see how they look in this new browser. If you have used CSS hacks on your site you may need to consider removing these hacks and using alternative methods to get your layout to display properly. I will install the preview release on the instructor workstation so that you will be able to check your sites here if you do not want to install the beta release at home.

I checked my blog and other sites in Internet Explorer 7 and the fonts were beyond tiny! Everything laid out well (thank heaven for small miracles), but I couldn’t read the text. Yikes! I discovered the the default text size for Internet Explorer 7 is set to smallest. You can change this in View > Text Size. I set mine to medium which is the default for IE 6.

Internet Explorer 7 now offers tabbed browsing just like Firefox. It also offers built in RSS support with a nice RSS feed reader built in. You can access your feeds by selecting View > Explorer Bar > Feeds. The interface is sleaker, a nice improvement over Internet Explorer 6. There are also some other nice new tools like a pop-up blocker and support for add-on programs, similar to Firefox extensions (it’s looking a lot like Firefox, IMHO).

Of course the biggest issue being discussed about the new beta release among developers is the “improved” CSS support. Since I just downloaded the software today I will wait a bit to comment on CSS and IE 7. Again, you can read more about the Internet Explorer 7 CSS support improvements at the IE blog. This resource blog also includes information on uninstalling the beta preview if necessary.

I will post more notes about this release as I have an opportunity to explore it. I will install the release on the instructor station this afternoon so that we can take a look at Internet Explorer 7 together.

Technorati tags: internet explorer, browsers, support, css, beta

Lorelle on WordPress has a wonderful article, DIY Search Engine Optimization.

This in-depth article should really help people who use WordPress as a blogging tool with their search engine optimization plan. This weekend I plan to review my blog and incorporate all of Lorelle’s suggestions. Even though there is a lot of information for WordPress users, this article is excellent for anyone who is building/promoting a web site.

I would like to thank Lorelle, she visits this site often, comments on posts, and offers advice and tips to students in this program. She is a great supporter of this class and her contributions are appreciated! Lorelle also reviewed this blog and posted links to her favorite articles.

Support and guidance from experts and members of industry is needed and greatly appreciated. Thank you!

wordpress, search engine optimization, promotion, advertising, marketing, web development