Three Ways to Improve Your Website
By Karen Cioffi
If you are like most people, your primary purpose for having a website is to promote your book, work, service or product. You want a site that will motivate visitors to purchase what you have to offer. Listening to marketing teleclasses and reading marketing articles, I’ve learned there are a number of factors that help create an effective website. Three factors are color, imagery, and font.
Colours
Colours are a key component in having an engaging site. Action colours are yellow, red, and orange. Blues evoke trust and green is soothing. Depending on what you are selling or what image you are tyring to present, you should use colours accordingly.
Colours should also be web safe. Colours like fonts, not all computers will read it the way it appears on your computer. If you want to make sure your ‘soft green’ background looks the same on every computer you need to use web safe colors. There are a number of sites that offer a fixed palette that you can use. If you’d rather not Google for it, here’s one:
http://www.techbomb.com/websafe/ to view these colours.
Imagery
Imagery is another tool that can be used to create a desired affect. For example, I have a children’s bedtime picture book. I could use a picture of me holding my grandson while reading the book to him. Include pictures that create the image you want to convey. My first website that I created for promoting my children’s book had a home page that immediately let the visitor know the site was for children. It was full of crayon colours such as red, yellow, green, and orange. It also had images that immediately let the reader know what the site was about. Putting the extra effort into using the right imagery will help sell your work, service or product.
Another facet of using imagery to promote you and/or your product is 3D imagery—this is an important aspect of creating a desired affect. In the myriad of research and studies that are done, it’s been determined that a 3D image is more effective for selling. The flat imagery is just that, flat. To see if there was a validity to this determination, I did my own test. I have been promoting my book with a flat image, but after learning about this new information, I stood my book up, opened it slightly and took a picture. I angled the shot so the book appeared slightly open. Well, this new data is correct; the 3D image is much more appealing than the flat image. It shows depth and shadows—this gives the affect of looking at an actual book rather than a flat stamp. So, when able, use 3D imagery.
Fonts
The third topic I’ll touch on to help improve your website is fonts. Fonts need to be web safe as I mentioned above. It would be a waste of time if you create an enticing website only to find the font you’ve used isn’t readable on some of your visitors’ computers. A few web safe fonts are: Arial, Times New Roman, Calibri, Century Gothic, and Cambria. There are other fonts you can use, just type in ‘web safe fonts’ in your search box and click GO—it’s that easy.
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Karen Cioffi-Ventrice
Author, ghostwriter, freelance writer, reviewer
Acquisitions Editor Intern with 4RV Publishing
http://www.dkvwriting4u.com
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