Why? One reason is that search engines has gotten so much smarter and effective than they were back then. Instead of search engines being just a list or a directory of websites, they’re able to dig deep into websites and find the content that people are actually looking for. And in most cases, that content is often not on the homepage…it’s usually deep within the secondary pages of a website.

Another reason is that these days people are sharing links to web pages instead of websites . So instead of just providing a link to a website like http://www.craftedweb.com, they’re sharing links to specific pages within a website like http://www.craftedweb.com/miscellaneous/blogging-what-to-do-with-your-old-blog-posts/ In fact, a good portion of your website visitors will probably never see your homepage.

So what does this mean for your website? Basically this means that you need to pay more attention to the secondary pages of your website, especially those pages that contain a lot of content or those pages that are part of buying process or list building process. You need to pay as much attention to those pages as you do for your homepage. Some of those pages may include:

• Product pages
• Product category pages
• Shopping cart page
• Mailing list signup page
• About pages

You may also want to check your website statistics to see which pages get the most traffic. Don’t be too surprised if your homepage isn’t at the top of your list.

This also means that you can’t get away with just providing things like your contact information and a sign up form for your mailing list on just one page of your website or only on the homepage. Because chances are that your visitors won’t see it if they enter your website on pages other than your website. If it’s important, it should appear somewhere on every page of your website.

While I’m not a big fan of Comic Sans or Curlz for that matter, I’ve always found a place for them and Papyrus in my font archive. If you’ve seen the movie Avatar or the trailer or at least the movie poster, you’ve seen what looks to be a close cousin of Papyrus being used in the logo…so it can’t be all bad.

Where do I stand on the debate? I’ve designed a number of banners and logos throughout the years and while there are some fonts that I use more than others, there are very few that I would absolutely refuse to consider. When it comes to designing a logo or a web banners, here are some the “rules” that I use:

1. The font you use should fit your brand- This is THE biggest consideration when it comes to designing something for your brand. Whatever you use, must fit the kind of image that you’re trying to portray. In many cases, that might not be Comic Sans or Papyrus, but I’ve seen some pretty good work that have used those fonts. And the reason why those fonts worked in those particular cases is that those fonts were used in a way that fit the brand.

2. It’s not always “what” you use, but “how” you use it- The mark of a great designer is the ability to take just about any material and transform it into something great. If you’re a Project Runway fan, then you’ve probably seen this season’s second challenge where the designers took potato sacks and transformed them from this:

To this:

If you’re designing a banner or logo on a budget, take a look as some of the free font sites like dafont.com. There are literally hundreds of free fonts that you can browse through and experiment with. Download what you like, what appears to fit the image you’re trying to project and play around with them.

Remember to use what you have in fun and different ways. Play around with color, shading, and size. Combine different elements like illustrations, photographs, and special effects to make your plain old simple font into something great.

3. In some cases you might have to consider paying for a font- You have to pay for certain fonts for a reason…it’s because they are usually a higher quality than those that you get for free. The characters are are finely formed, most come with full character choices, including punctuation and other special characters. And many of the paid fonts also have true bold and true italic version instead of the “faux bold” and “faux italic” options you have to use in Microsoft and Photoshop. Therefore your logo or banner looks a bit more professional. There are many projects in which I had to bite the bullet and buy a font because it fit the needs of a project perfectly.

4. Keep it simple- Just like you can take a plain old free font and do something spectacular with it, you can also take a nice paid font and make your banner look like a hot mess. In most cases simple will do much better than something that’s overly worked and complicated. This is especially true if the font itself is fancy or have complicated looking elements. In that case, balance out a heavy or complicated looking font with simple elements, layouts or colors.

5. Keep it readable- This should go without saying, but if you’re making a banner or a logo that contains the name of your business, anyone looking at it should be able to actually read it. Don’t sacrifice readability for style.

6. Keep an eye on what everyone else is using- Just like everything else, fonts seem to go in and out of popularity. So keep your eyes peeled as to what kind of fonts designers seem to be using. If you see a font that you love, then you can find out what it is by going to What the Font! If you want to seem trendy and up to date, keeping up with the trends might be good for you. On the other hand, if you want to be unique and want to stand out a bit, you might want to do the opposite and pull an old but perfectly great font out of the mothballs.

7. When in doubt…take it to a professional- If you don’t know what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter what font you’re using. Some artists can easily take their design expertise and make some perfectly beautiful logos and banners. Some can’t. If you’re in the latter group and nothing you try looks right, then get a graphic designer to help you. Getting a professionally designed Etsy or blog banner shouldn’t set you back too much. I typically charge between $40 to $50 for a blog banner. So you can look for folks in that price range and you’ll get something that looks nicer and less stress inducing.

So where do you stand on the great font debate? Is there a font you love or one that you love to hate? Drop me a comment and let me know!

Apparently, the talk with the old web designer didn’t go very well as the next email and phone call I got was panicked one asking me to please help them. The current web designer didn’t like the fact the client wanted to leave and had started to shut down parts of their various websites…and had threatened to erase them completely.

Now how could something like this happen? While most web designers I know are trustworthy and ethical, unfortunately this is not the first time I’ve witnessed something like this. If you have someone that’s helping you to design or maintain your website, you have to be very careful not to give them absolute control or allow them to own critical parts of your web presence…lest you might find yourself in the same situation as my unfortunate prospective client.

Here are some tips on how to keep control of your website:

1. Always purchase your own domain names- Never, ever allow anyone except yourself to purchase the domain name(s) for your website. Some designers will offer to buy the domain for you as a “convenience”. Don’t let them! It’s a simple matter for them to name themselves as the owner of the domain name which will make it impossible for you to do anything with it without going through your designer. That means that if you get into a dispute, then the designer can keep your domain name or refuse to allow you to transfer it over to another web host. You web designer can easily hold your entire website “hostage” this way.

Buying a domain name is not difficult. You can get one at Namespot Domains in less than five minutes for less than $10 per year. Remember that your domain name is like real estate on the Internet and once someone purchases one, it’s theirs until they decide to give up ownership. Don’t delegate something that important to someone else.

2. Keep track of all your important account information- In most cases, your web designer will need to have access to your web hosting account information, or the log-in to your YouTube account or any kind of account that you might need to allow them access to do their jobs. Just like your domain name account, you need to be the primary contact for all of your online accounts. That means if anything goes wrong, the first person these companies will contact will be you…not your designer.

You also need to keep track of passwords, usernames, account numbers and you need to log on to these accounts on a regular basis to make sure that you have access to them. This will keep your web designer from locking you out of your important accounts in the case of a dispute.

3. Keep a copy of your website in your possession- Even if you’ve hired a professional to maintain your website for you, you should always have an up-to-date copy of your website in a place were you can grab it in an emergency like your computer hard drive, a CD, or a thumb drive. This is a good idea anyway just in case your web host starts having problems and you need to find a new host quickly. But it’s also a good way to keep an unscrupulous web designer from blackmailing you by threatening to shut down your website.

Also, if your website also uses a database of any kind…say your website has an online store like Zen Cart or OScommerce or you’re running a Wordpress blog, make sure that you also have recent backups of those as well…especially if these databases contains customer or financial information of any kind. It’s actually a lot worse to lose this information than it would be to lose your website. You can at least recreate a website…it’s much harder to recover customer information.

Ask your web designer to show you how to retrieve back ups of your website and databases if you have them and start getting backups of your website on at a weekly basis. If your web designer can’t (or won’t, which is a bad sign) show you how to retrieve your backups, contact your hosting company and have tech support show you how to do it.

4. Don’t allow your lack of knowledge get in the way- I’m always giving my own clients and potential prospects this advice and as a rule, I never register domain names or open hosting accounts for my clients, even if they ask me to. Some of the less technically savvy ones are always trying to get me to do stuff like this for them because they don’t want to have to deal with the “technical stuff”. But I always warn them that their lack of technical knowledge is the thing that makes them vunerable to getting ripped-off by someone less than honest.

The bottom line is that if you’re going to have a website, there’s going to be a certain amount of “technical stuff” that you’re going to have to deal with. It comes with the territory. And the more knowledgeable you are about this stuff, the less likely you’re going to be taken by an unscrupulous web designer. This doesn’t mean that you need to turn yourself into a tech nerd. But every small business owner who owns a website should know how to buy their own domain names, open up a web hosting account, open up accounts at YouTube, Facebook, etc, and how to make regular backups of their website. If you know how to do these things…you won’t find yourself in the position of the poor soul I talked to this weekend.

So what do you think? Do you have a web designer horror story you want to share? Leave your tips and stories in the comments section!

P.S. Some time back, I did a telephone interview on how to find and work with a web designer with marketing expert, Connie Green. You can listen to an excerpt of the interview here.

This tradition eventually migrated over to the online world where all of the important content on the homepage (or any page for that matter) was designed to be “above the fold”. In the online world, “above the fold” meant the part of the web page that you can see without having to scroll down.

This sometimes made for some very messy layouts where designers sometimes tried to cram everything at the top of a website so that people wouldn’t have to scroll down. The logic was that people hated to scroll, so if you had something on your website that you really wanted people to look at, make sure that it was located at the top. Back when this principle was during it’s heyday, I had websites that were a nightmare to design because the client didn’t want people to scroll down at all!

According to this mini-report that’s no longer true today because:

1. Monitor sizes have gotten bigger (an Apple Cinema display anyone?)
2. Screen resolutions are getting smaller
3. Because of the different sized monitors and screen resolutions, there’s no certainty of where “the fold” actually is
4. People really don’t mind scrolling down after all…especially if you have a nifty scroll-wheel mouse

So what does this mean for you and your art website? Basically this:

• It’s still a good idea to design your website so that your most important content is up at the top…but you don’t have to cram everything else up there too.
• If your “above the fold” content indicates that there’s more good information if you just scroll down…people will do it.
• Sprinkle your “calls to actions” or other important stuff on different positions throughout the page. My newsletter sign ups are located in three different pages on any part of my blog. At the top of a blog post, at the upper right hand corner…and on the footer of the blog. The top spot still gets 85% of the sign ups…but people still sign up from the footer too!

You can download the report here. It’s a really quick and interesting read.

• Make sure that you start with the best possible images. Photoshop can only do so much. An image that’s already blurry, poorly lit, or small can’t be made to look fabulous through the magic of Photoshop. For some tips on how to get great images of your artwork, you can check out my Photographing Your Artwork roundup post.

• Avoid putting images with large files sizes on your web. An image that is a megabyte (MB) in size takes some time to load up on a browser and on average, you’ve only got 8 seconds or less before a visitor decides to leave your website. Things that effect the file size of your image includes the actual size (in pixel) of your image, the format, and the resolution. Here’s a detailed explanation on how image resolution and image size can effect the speed of your website.

• Make sure that your images are no more than 72 dpi in resolution and are either in .gif, .jpg, or .png format before you put them on your website. If your images are photographs of your work, .jpg is the best format. You can check out a previous post I did about image formats for the web to learn more.

• Make sure that the actual image size and file size of your photographs are the final size that you want on your website. Don’t take a picture from your digital camera that’s 3MB and 3000 x 2000 pixels in size and expect to resize it in Dreamweaver or Expression Web. These programs don’t actually change the image, they only change how the image is displayed on your web page. You need to have a graphics editing program like Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, or GIMP to resize your images. You can also use online image editors like Splashup, Picnik, and Photoshop Express for some quick resizing jobs.

• For the best quality images, remember that you should size down rather than size up. If you have an image that’s small, don’t try to enlarge it to make it look bigger. It usually ends up looking fuzzy. Instead, start with a large image and size it down.

• Make sure that you save your original images when you’re doing any resizing or retouching. Once you save over that image, there’s no going back. This is especially important to remember if you are sizing down an image or saving an image as a .jpg.

• Avoid saving and resaving .jpg images. The .jpg format is what’s known as a “lossy” image format. That is, the quality of the image degrades a bit every time you save it. If you can, keep your original images in a “lossless” format like .tif or .eps and save your .jpgs from those images.

So while I’m on the subject of text on your website, here are a few more tips:

Don’t make the main body of your text too small, especially if your audience is *ahem* mature. Don’t go smaller than 11 point, and 12 to 14 point is usually ideal.

Stay away from low contrast text. This is the old light gray text on the white background color scheme that was all the rage a few years back. Some designers made it a double whammy and also made the text extra small to boot. Folks with low vision…heck even folks with normal vision may have problems reading it. Some people have commented that they find black on white a bit harsh. If you want to go a little gray on your text that’s fine, just make it a dark grey.

Be consistent with your fonts. In an effort to make websites more interesting, some people make the mistake of using just about every single font in the world on one page. While a talented designer can pull off the multiple font families trick and make it look interesting, if you don’t know what you’re doing you’ll probably end up making it look like a mess. A rule of thumb I use is to stick with one kind of font for your headlines and subheadings and another kind of font for your body copy and captions on your website. That’s simple enough to keep most people out of trouble.

You’ll also want to be consistent with your font sizes as well. Body copy should be between no smaller than 11 point all the way up to 14 point. Main headlines can be 4 to 10 points higher than your body copy and your sub-headlines can be in between your body copy and your main headline sizes. Captions are usually 2 to 4 points smaller than your body copy.

Don’t underline any text that’s NOT a link. Sometimes people underline words in their website text to emphasize words. The problem with this method is that most people know that underlined words usually means that that piece of text is a link and they’ll click on the words to see where they’ll go. If your words are just underlined, but not a link, then you’re going to end up frustrating your visitors. Use means other than underlining to emphasize your text such as bolding, changing the text color, using all caps, or sizing.

Stay away from using blue on text that’s NOT a link. The same rule about underlined text also goes for blue text. For most people, blue text automatically means that the text is a link and they’ll try to click on it. Try to avoid using the same “hyperlink blue” color on any text that’s not a link.

Avoid overuse of text centering
Centering your headlines are okay
But centering whole paragraphs is not
It’s just plain annoying
And unprofessional looking
So don’t do it

KEEP THE USE OF ALL CAPS TO A MINIMUM. AN ALL CAP WORD OR A SENTENCE IS ALRIGHT, BUT AN ENTIRE PARAGRAPH IS CONSIDERED SHOUTING. PLUS READING ALL CAPS IS VERY HARD ON THE EYES. SO DON’T DO IT.

Stick with your standard “web fonts”. Remember that fancy fonts don’t always work on your website. In order for a person to be able to see whatever special font that you have declared on your website, they also have to have that same font installed on their computers. If they don’t, then their computer will resort to the next handiest font and you’re not always sure what that will be. So to stay on the safe side, stick with those fonts that are pretty standard across most computers. Those include; Arial, Courier, Georgia, Impact, Tahoma, Trebuchet, Helvetica, Verdana, Times New Roman, and Palatino.

So that’s my list of tips to keep your website text visitor friendly. If you have any tips of your own, leave a comment and let me know.

Reversed color text is one of the hardest color schemes to read from. While it can be okay in tiny, tiny doses, an entire website or blog with this color scheme is very hard on the eyes…and you certainly don’t want to make anything hard on your visitors. Plus, the fact that this color scheme plays havoc when you’re trying to print and with people that are visually impaired.

The best color scheme for text on your website is the good old fashioned black text on a white background. Open up a magazine, a book, a newspaper, and what color scheme do you see for reading? Black text on a white background. It’s rare for you see more than a paragraph or two in a different color scheme and it’s like that for a reason. Readability.

If your website or blog uses this color scheme, change it as quickly as possible. Your visitors will thank you for it.

Do you have a website design “pet peeve”? Leave a comment and let me know!

Artist’s website took FOUR clicks before I got to see any artwork. Grrr…

This kind of reminds me of that Tootsie Roll commercial that asked how many licks it took to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. Mr. Owl took three licks before he gave up and bit into the Tootsie pop.

How many clicks are your customers going to take before they give up and leave?

Sometimes in the interest of keeping things neat and organized on our websites or because of how online store software is built, we end up putting our artwork in numerous categories and sub-categories, and sub-sub categories divided according to medium, style, product line, price, and however else you can categorize something.

The result can be a labrynth of web pages that hopefully leads to your artwork at the end. The question is are your customer going to follow you that far? And if they do, how are they going to find their way back? Add a slow loading site to the mix and your customers probably won’t even make it through three clicks.

Next time you visit your website, do the following:

1. Go through your website and count how many clicks it takes before you can find your artwork or you can buy something. If you get past three, you may have to reconsider your site navigation.

2. Look at your navigation categories. Would they make sense to anyone who’s not familiar with your work? Are there too many? Is the same product showing up in more than one or two different categories? Is there a way to combine some sub-categories in a more streamlined way?

3. Have friend or family member who’s not familiar with your website log on and try to find something specific. Tell them to find a particular item on your website or a particular piece of information. Sit beside them and watch them try to find it and don’t give them any help. If you see them fumbling around or taking a lot longer than they should be, you may have a problem.

4. Watch for useless extra steps. Are you putting information on two or three pages when you could just combine the pages and save people from the extra steps? One of my pet peeves is when you have a list of questions and you have to click through to get the answer…one answer, then click back to read the rest of the question list. If you find one of these extra steps on your website that don’t serve a good purpose, eliminate them.

Thanks to danidraws (aka Dani Jones) for inspiring this post! And if you get a chance, check out her website for some incredible illustrations!

Mark this as one of the website mistakes you don’t ever want to make on your art website. That mistake is autoplaying music or some other type of sound on your site. While this isn’t as rampant on the web as it used to be, the big exception seeming to be MySpace where I have to surf with my headphones off and the speakers turned down, it’s still annoying when you run into it.

Some people put music on their site to create some type of “atmosphere” for their visitors…like you’re stepping into a gallery or your local Pottery Barn. Or, instead of music, they’ll greet their customers with an audio message from themselves.

While music in your local mall or chain boutique might be useful, these tactics don’t really fly in the online world for a couple reasons:

1. A lot of people do their surfing at work. If they land on your page and their speakers start blasting your music or your audio greeting, that tells everyone in the office that they’re surfing the web and NOT working. Your visitor will end up leaving your page in search of one that’s quieter and less likely to get them fired.

2. A lot of people surf with their headphones on. While that solves the problem of your music invading the common space, it can get really painful for your visitor if your music is too loud or if their speakers are turned up. I often have my earbuds on when I’m on the web and there’s nothing more painful than have a million decibels shoot straight into your ear canal because someone thought it was clever to have their iTunes playlist running in the background of their websites at full blast. How much you want to bet that I or anyone else will want to hang around on your page after we’ve gone deaf?

3. Unlike stores, galleries, and craft shows, people don’t visit websites to “hang out” or take in the “atmosphere”. This is one reason why music works at your local Starbucks and doesn’t work on your website. In fact, try going to Starbucks.com and see if you hear the same music you hear in their stores playing on their website when you first arrive. Thought not.

People online are usually goal oriented. They want to visit a website, find what they’re looking for, then leave. Making someone scramble around looking for a way to turn off your music or turn down their speakers gets in the way of their goal and frustrates them. And frustrated people abandon things that frustrate them.

Now this is not to say that you shouldn’t have music or any kind of sound on your website. In my recent audio download, “10 Steps to Getting More Traffic on Your Website“, I talked a bit about how you can use audio to help increase traffic for your website. In certain situations and applications, music and audio can certainly be useful. The key is to do it right:

1. Give your visitors control over what they hear. Don’t force your visitors to listen to your music or your voice the moment they land on your website. Let them be able to turn the sound on or off and also let them be able to control the volume.

2. Have a good reason to have sound on your website. If your main motivation for having sound on your website is that it seems like a cool thing to do, you need to rethink that motivation. Most people aren’t going to buy something or sign up for your mailing list just because you have cool music playing in the background. In most cases, music or audio that has no real purpose ends up just being a distraction. Unless your business is music or music related, people aren’t going to visit your website to listen to music. That’s what radios and iPods are for.

3. This also applies to videos as well. One of my biggest pet peeves with some of these video sharing sites like YouTube and blip.tv is that they autostart their videos. If your video has sound, autostarting the video has the same effect as autostarting audio. Again, you need to give your visitors control over whether they want to watch your video or not.

So that’s one of my web pet peeves. What’s yours? Post a comment and tell us your rant!

P.S. Thanks to wren2000 for inspiring this post and for Maxell for the above ad image…that has to be one of the most famous ads ever.

But when it comes to your customers, they’re really not interested in looking at a work of online digital art…they just want to see your work, sign up for your newsletter, and possibly buy something from you. After all, you’re selling art, not your web design. Your website needs to be like that perfect gallery space, enhancing your art, not competing with it.

Smashing Magazine has a great blog post on How Simple Web Design Helps Your Business, with some great examples of e-commerce sites that keep it simple without simple meaning “bland”. Check it out here.

I love discovering new blogs to read. I recently started reading a great blog for indie designers called “Try This at Home“. It’s a fabulous little blog with designer interviews, advice on how to build an indie business, and various craft tutorials. While exploring the blog, I found this post called “Build a Better Website” in which the blog author, Maddy lists a couple of suggestions on how artists and designers can better design their websites. I love that this is written from the point of view of a typical web surfer. Advice includes:

3. Don’t use blink or marquee tags, or use a large block of h1, h2, or other headline text…

I remember when the web was crawling with this…yetch!

4. Try to keep your typefaces down to three, maximum…

Unfortunately the web is still crawling with this…

6. Sketch out a clear and concise way to organize your information before you get started, and always consider how YOU would use the site if you were just a visitor, not the owner…

Out of this list, the absolute best piece of advice is #6. So many people just jump right into the process of designing their sites with out even figuring out what pages they really need and how they are supposed to connect to each other. This is just like building a house without putting in a sturdy foundation. Everyone knows that if the foundation isn’t right…the rest of your house is screwed up. It’s easier to create a good structure for your website at the beginning than it is for you to fix a messed up one. Why? Two words…”search engines”. Remember that people aren’t the only visitors to your website. Once search engines find your website and list all of the pages of your site in their databases, any change you make in how you name your pages, how you link to them, and what pages you have on your site can cause confusion when your site comes up in search engine results. So one day when you decide to fix a badly structured website any links you may have from search engines or from other websites may disappear if you’re not careful.

So if you’re building a brand new website…get the foundation right the first time…and stay away from that flashing text.

Be sure to read the read of the “Build a Better Website” post at the “Try This At Home” blog.

<span style=”#FF7FBF”>PINK</span>.

And you’ll get…

PINK

On the COLOURLovers blog, there is a big list of hex codes for a quick reference. Check this list out if you’re stumped on which code represents which color. You can check out the list here:

http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/2007/06/30/ultimate-html-color-hex-code-list/

And be sure to check out the rest of the COLOURlovers web site once you get there. If you’re ever stumped for some kind of color choice for your web site, your next piece, or even for decorating your studio, you’ll find the inspiration at COLOURlovers. There you can search through color palettes, read up on color trends and news…and even talk with other color fiends on the discussion boards. Take a look at: http://www.colourlovers.com/

Fly fishing is not my thing tho’, so I’ve been “stumbling upon” sites that have to do with jewelry, art, web design, and graphic design, and I’ve hit on a bunch of really useful web and graphic design sites, a few of which I’ll mention here:

The first site, BittBox is actually a blog that has very cool tutorials for Photoshop and Illustrator, so if you have some basic experience with either of these two programs and you want to stretch your skill a bit, you may want to try some of these tutorials. But not only does Bittbox have tutorials, but there are a number of free goodies like graphics and fonts that are available for you to download to use. Amazingly this blog is only about 3 months old, but there’s some good stuff there.

If you haven’t a clue about how the whole process of designing and launching a web site works, you should visit the Beginner’s section of the site Web Design from Scratch and get a quick overview. The site is maintained by web designer Ben Hunt who is in the midst of writing a book “50 Redesigns from Scratch”. Even if you aren’t a rank beginner when it comes to building your place on the web, there are some useful articles on HTML, the design process, copywriting, and other topics.

This next site is more of an online magazine of sorts. Smashing Magazine is focuses on rounding up some of the latest web trends and techniques. While this site is targeted towards web designers and developers, it’s great for finding resources and inspiration. I’m especially fond of their design showcases like the 50 Most Beautiful Web Designs in 2006, 49 Simple Web Designs, and 50 Remarkable Favicons (you know…those little graphics you see on the address bar of your browser). If you are a newbie at Dreamweaver, you should check out yesterday’s roundup, Adobe Dreamweaver Tutorials

The web site Photoshop Lab, has a number of tutorials for special effects, tips on useful Photoshop shortcuts, news, reviews, and links to other Photoshop resources. If you’re a beginner, you can go to the Beginner’s section and get up to speed on using the basic tools in Photoshop and basic shortcuts. And you can keep up to date on all the news and tutorials by subscribing to the Photoshop Lab blog.

Phong is actually I web site that I used when I was first learning how to use Photoshop and to my surprise I found that it’s still around. Phong focuses on using Photoshop to create specific special effects and the tutorials are categorized as basic, intermediate, and advanced. If you’ve always wanted to learn how to stitch photos together to create a panoramic image, how to use drop shadows, how to design metallic wires, or how to make your text look like metal or glass…Phong is your web site. While some of the effects are probably too far out for your web site (the web site itself is pretty far out), just going through the tutorials is a great way to practice and sharpen up your Photoshop skills.

This last web site is not specifically a Photoshop web site, but it’s very useful one if you don’t have much experience in graphic design. Chuck Green’s Ideabook focuses on graphic design and how to use it for effective marketing. Ideabook focuses on print design, but it also has some useful advice for web design as well. As many of the design principles in print also apply in web design, there’s some very useful advice for you if you need to design your web site. So you can learn how to pick a commercial printer for printing your business card as well as how to integrate you web site design with your brochure. And if you need a logo for your web site, check out the tutorial Step by step logo to see what the process is behind designing a logo…fascinating stuff.

Do you have a favorite design or Photoshop resource? Leave a comment and share!

Now I suppose that this artist has pretty good work, but I could barely look at it because they had unfortunately designed their site with a bright red background and tiny little pictures…and to make matters worse, the links were in pale lavender. After a minute or two of looking around the site, I just had to leave because of the vast sea of red assaulting my eyes. And my eyes were still watery a few minutes after leaving the site.

Now if I really, really wanted to look at the site, I could have adjusted my monitor…and to be fair the site looked a little less bright on my PC’s monitor…but it was still uncomfortably bright…but how many of your visitors will be willing to adjust their monitors just to look at your site? In most cases they’ll flee to preserve their eyesight just like I did. So when choosing background colors or background images for your web site, remember these tips:

1. Avoid large blocks of very bright colors. Watch your reds, oranges, and particularly vibrant shades of blue or green. If your color palette includes bright colors, make sure that it’s not large expanses of unbroken color, break it up with text and picture to minimize the impact.

2. Avoid large busy patterns for a background. These also hurt the eyes and it’s a nightmare when you add text.

3. Avoid background colors that are too close to the color of the text. Low contrast between the text and the background makes your copy hard to read and strains the eyes. That also goes for active and visited hyperlinks.

4. Try to check the color of your background on different monitors. What looks sunny and perky on your monitor might be blinding on someone else’s

If there are some tips I might have missed, leave a comment and add yours!

Adobe Systems, the folks behind Photoshop and Illustrator has this cool online color palette tool called Kuler in which you can create your own color palettes, share them with others, look at the palettes that other people have created, and even download the palette as a theme to use with your Adobe Creative Suite 2 software.

Even if you don’t download the particular theme, you can still dig deeper and get the RGB codes and the Hex numbers for the particular colors. While I don’t think that there is a “Web safe color option” in these themes, it’s still good for seeing what kind of color combinations you and other people can come up with.

As cool as this tool is, there are a couple caveats. One, you’ll need to upgrade to Flash Player 9 since it’s built in Flash 9. I get the sneaking suspicion that they’re doing this so everyone will upgrade to the latest version of Flash Player…but while it’s an inconvenience it’s a minor one. Second, although you can look at the different color combinations, if you want to download a theme, see the RGB codes or create your own theme, you’ll need to get an Adobe ID. Signing up for an Adobe account is free and fairly easy though. So you can try out Kuler here:
http://kuler.adobe.com/

Another tool that doesn’t rely on Flash or an Adobe ID is an old standby that I’ve been using for years. The Color Index by Jim Krause is color reference book that has over 1100 color combinations in both CMYK and RGB modes. There’s a whole section that deals only with web safe color combinations and palettes are divided by mood and intensity. I’ve bought this book years ago and it sits right next to my computer. I still reach for it on occasion to help get me out of a color rut, marking some combinations for possible use and sometimes taking similar palettes and doing my own mixes from the suggested palettes.

Do you have a favorite color combo tool that you use that I haven’t mentioned? Leave a comment and let me know!

One of the many annoyances of web design is having to pick a nice font for your web site that isn’t Arial or Times New Roman or Helvetica. Sure you can take your chances and pick a nice font that you found on your computer, but remember that everyone else in the world may not have it installed on theirs…and as a result, instead of your web page displaying that cool font it will default to another font like…Arial…Times New Roman…or Helvetica.

Fortunately, there’s a neat tool on the web that can help you choose and format your fonts. Typetester, an online font comparison tool allows you to choose and view different types of fonts side by side. It has a list of fonts that are common to all computers as well as list of fonts that are common on Windows machines and on Apple machines. You can also test out all of the neat typography tricks that graphic designers love to tweak, like the adjusting the leading and word spacing and adding font decoration. And by using the side by side comparison feature, you can test different fonts and settings with each other. Very useful…be sure to check it out!