Cool Colors

First, you have cool colors that you can use when you are designing your website. One of the colors that is considered to be cool is blue. Blue can be an excellent color for use on a website because it makes people feel calm. It also brings about feelings of trust and intelligence. For this reason, many health and financial sites use this color. Another cool color is green. This color can stand for wealth and money. However, it is also associated with green and jealousy, something you need to consider. Purple is also a cool color that is known to stand for being creative.

Warm Colors

There are several warm colors that you can use on your web design as well. However, it’s important to know more about these colors and what they mean and the emotions that they evoke before you use them. Yellow is a warm color that can stand for happiness and warmth. Orange is another warm color that can stimulate appetite and it is often associated with Halloween and Fall. Pink is a warm color that is associated with romance and innocence. Last, you have red, which really draws the attention of the visitor. It can raise blood pressure and may also stand for passion and anger.

Neutral Colors

A variety of different neutral colors are available to use when designing your website too. White is a neutral color, standing for cleanliness and purity. Black is also considered to be a neutral color. It is associated with elegance, power, and sophistication. Grays are very conservative and they also exude feelings of reliability too.

Information on Color Schemes

When you are planning to design colors for your website, you also need to learn about color schemes and how to use them. One type of color scheme is a single color scheme, which makes use of the same color but in several different shades of that color. Contrasting color schemes are another option that you can use for your website. With this type of a scheme, dominant colors help you design an effect that really grabs the eyes. Complementary color schemes are another option where at least two complimentary colors are used in the scheme and this makes an very appealing look for those who visit your website.

If you have spent any time at all writing web pages, you know the frustration of writing and not being able to see what the page looks like. So you need to save once in a while, open your index file and view the results of your HTML. This takes time and if you are using tables or vertically arranged images and elements, you need to know that you have everything where it belongs.

The simple way to do this is to use one of the many free HTML editors. This is a simple downloadable program that lets you do a lot of work in a short period of time. After you get the program on your computer, you can copy and paste the HTML of any or all of your pages into the editor. Now you are able to work on your pages and not worry about publishing a mistake-ridden document.

An HTML editor lets you place elements on your page that you would normally have to program yourself. Things like dropdown menus, tables, sidebars, forms and more are at your fingertips. The best part is that you do not have to write one single character of HTML for any of it; the editor does it for you. You simply choose the element you want, add the values and the rest is magic.

Entering the main body text is a snap with an HTML editor. Just write the text and you can change the style, size or color of any word of it at any time. Sort of like the way you do it in a Word document. The whole thing is designed so that anyone can create dynamic, eye-catching web pages quickly.

Now, after you get all the elements in the right places, all you have to do is copy the code and paste it into the corresponding page file on your site. All web hosts give their members access to a set of tools and options for managing their pages. In there somewhere is a file manager. This is where your pages are stored in a way that lets you view the HTML, change it and republish your page(s).

Aside from those amazing benefits, there is another one that cannot be ignored. Many of the editors available let you actually SEE the results of your HTML in a split screen view. One side has the HTML entry area and the other displays the code as it appears to visitors. This allows you to correctly place your web page elements where you want them the first time.

Remember that HTML is primarily a display language, so being able to use the editor this way greatly increases your productivity. Rather than having to type all those tags and attributes, you just tell the editor what you want and it applies the HTML for you. In addition, it writes the proper syntax so you don’t have to worry about broken or bad HTML.

Your white space is also optimized so loading time is not adversely affected either.

All of these benefits are yours for a free download of an HTML editor. You have everything to gain and nothing at all to lose, folks. Get one soon and turn out pages like a pro.

Another web page language is XHTML. The acronym stands for eXtensible Hyper Text Markup Language. In context, XHTML looks like standard HTML. The difference is that this language has more rules that MUST be followed to achieve the desired outcome. In that sense, XHTML is more exacting and a bit cleaner.

A worthy note here is that the two languages, HTML and XHTML, can work side by side in the same document. That is to say that you can write a web page using both languages and it will work just fine. This is because XHTML is a combination of HTML and a les lenient markup language called XML. XML is designed as a descriptive element to data while HTML is designed as a display element. Therefore, the two are compatible.

The reason we want to use a clean language on our web pages is cross browser applications. Technology has given us many different types of browsers. Some of these run on our laptops and home PCs. Others run inside mobile devices like phones, blackberries and PDAs. These browsers are not able to read and effectively display bad or broken HTML. So the exacting syntax of XML makes XHTML compatible across all these browsers.

There are four main differences between the two languages. First, elements in an XHTML document need to have proper nesting syntax.

This means that you need to close the LAST tag first in nested tags, like this:

<i><u>This text is underlined and italicized</u></i>

Notice how I closed the “underline” tag first even though it was opened last.

Next, all elements in an XHTML document MUST be closed. Each and every opening tag you write HAS to have a closing tag. This is not the case with standard HTML.

Third, all XHTML tags or elements are ALWAYS written in lower case. No exceptions. No upper case letters in any tags.

Last, you must have one root element. This is usually the <html> tag you put at the top of the document. Everything else must be nested between that opening root tag and the closing </html> tag at the end of the document.

Several more rules apply here as well, as follows:

All tags or commands in lower case.

All values called or designated in the tags must be enclosed in quotation marks.

Making tags smaller, or minimizing them, is not acceptable.

There are mandatory elements that MUST be present in the document, ie…a doctype declaration and tags for html, body and title. These MUST be include in the document.

You can get started on switching your HTML pages to XHTML very easily. Start looking for open tags with no closings. Then look for capital letters in the attributes (tags) and make them lower case. Finally, be certain that you have a doctype declared BEFORE the HTML tag.

Do this and you’re on your way to writing your pages in one of the most widely accepted markup languages on the planet. Your pages will be visible to all users regardless of the device they are using. This gives you a larger audience and the possibility for more visits and success.

Of course, web design has made incredible leaps forward since the days of 14.4 K modems and text-only web browsers. While text only browsers are still available (and actually, you may want to install one yourself for reasons we’ll explain later on), they are hardly the norm. Web content is now decidedly visually oriented and people think about the World Wide Web and the pages on it in a different way than they once did. The view of internet content was once that it was a sort of technologically advanced extension of print media, but the web has now taken on a life of its own and has become very much its own medium.

Photos and other images are now an important part of nearly every website, especially now that dynamic Web 2.0 platforms have become popular ways for users to share their own content. It’s almost unimaginable in this day and age that someone would create a website without including any graphical elements for readers. Everyone uses images as part of their web design now, but what not everyone is doing with their website images is using them to their full advantage.

If you’ve spent any time reading about web design or basically any other internet related topic, chances are that you’re at least somewhat familiar with the concept of search engine optimization or SEO. This is a fascinating topic in itself, though we’ll refrain from going into too much detail of the nuts and bolts of search engine optimization here. What is important to know about SEO for our purposes today is that it refers to a number of techniques which increase the amount of traffic to websites by fine tuning the content as well as some of the behind the scenes elements of web pages to make it easier for major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo to index their content properly and increase site rankings in search engine results.

Even if you already know about using keywords to optimize your text content for the search engines, you may not know that the images on your website can also be optimized in order to make your site more attractive to search engines and thus easier for your target audience to find.

Optimizing your site’s images and other graphical content is a good thing to do for a couple of reasons. It helps your site to climb higher in the search results so that you’ll bring in more visitors. It’s also a good web design move in terms of enhancing your site’s accessibility to visually impaired web users and users who use older hardware and software with limited webpage rendering capabilities – and increasingly, the major search engines are starting to reward accessibility standards compliant websites with a boost in their rankings. It’s a win-win situation; your site benefits in terms of more traffic and you do the right thing by making the web just a little more accessible to users who sometimes find that not every website’s content is available to them.

Best of all, optimizing the images on your site is fairly easy to do. You don’t have to be a programmer in order to do this, though you will need to learn a few simple HTML tags. If your website is powered by WordPress or many other modern content management systems, you may not even have to do that, since these platforms usually offer a user-friendly method of tagging your images as you upload them to the site and post them on your web pages.

Assuming yours is a static HTML/XHTML based website, you’ll have to use Alt tags for your images; these provide alternate text which is placed on your site instead of the images themselves when your site is viewed in text only browsers or using screen reader software.  Without these tags, search engines don’t know what your images are or what they’re about  – they only see the text content of your site and its HTML code.

This is where trying out a text-only browser (like Lynx for Windows or w3m or Links for Linux systems) is educational. View your site in a text only browser before and after adding Alt tags; before, there’s nothing – but after, there’s a description of the image which actually tells your visitors something. Since these Alt tags can also incorporate your site’s important keywords where appropriate, it can also give your site’s SEO efforts just a little more of a boost. Every little bit helps when you’re trying to attract an audience, so optimizing your images isn’t just good web design, it’s also good business.

HTML was developed for the purpose of describing the content of a website. It was never intended to be visually pleasing. Semantic content is this concept of describing the content, and does not focus on the visual aspect of a page.

The syntax of a code refers to the correctness of the code, if the code is executing things correctly, that there are no mistakes in the code. However the semantics refer to doing the correct things, if only those things are done which need to be done. It ensures that no unintended tasks are accomplished correctly. Please note that the difference between the two lies between doing the task correctly and doing the correct task.

For e.g., in HTML, we can give heading of a page as:
this is a heading

This will be interpreted by HTML as a common statement with different font. The syntax of the statement is correct as it is accomplishing the correct thing. But we want here is the browser to understand and interpret the statement as a heading and not as a normal statement. The browser will be able to process it as title only if it understands that it is one.

So for the computer to understand that this is a title, you can write the following code:

this is a heading

A file called CSS (cascading style sheet) can then be created to define the appearance of the heading separately.

Both of the codes above give the effect of the statement being a title, then why there is need to write it in the latter manner? Here are some of the reasons:

• Placement in Search Engine: It helps in understanding the content properly and thus affects the page rank. It is easier for ‘search engine spiders’ to understand and thus improves your placement in the search engine.
• Aids Accessibility: Speech browsers (mainly used by visually impaired) rely on the semantics to understand the content.
• Semantic code is easier to download as it is shorter, as shown in the example above.
• By using semantic code, the site updates becomes easier, as you can apply changes to all the headings in the site simultaneously by changing the CSS.
• It is easier to understand.

Coming to the step of ensuring that your website is written semantically, there is no automated tool to ensure this. You will have to go through the code to check if it contains colors and font tags instead of describing the content. Or the other way out could be to directly ask your designer if they use semantic code. If he looks at you blankly, then you can be sure that he is not adhering to it. This way you can easily get to know that its time either you push your designer that semantic code for your website is a necessity or change the designer.