David Fiske A subtle blend of affiliate marketing and web development

It is useful at this point to put the fourth screenshot alongside the third to see the differences.

Despite they are of different pages and there has been a colour change, there are other significant changes.
 
Screenshot 4



Screenshot 3



The colour has changed from a murky green to a slick, professional shade of blue. It adds a dash of professionalism to the site plus makes it more vibrant and welcoming. It goes to show that a change of colour can indeed make or break a site.

Those of you who have read past lectures may remember that I didn't want blue! However, sometimes you just have to see how things turn out. Let's face it, as I am using a CSS file to control colours, all I have to do is change a few colour codes and I have a completely new site!

You can see that the headers in Screenshot 3 were grey and did not stand out. These have been changed to brown. Why brown? I uses a site called Color Blender that suggests palettes of colours to use in your website design. Some are terrible and I would never consider using them. Others, however, a great! You can even tell it to start with a base colour and derive a colour palette, or let it select a random colour set. You can finder the colour scheme for Compare Sat Nav at http://colorblender.com/?preloadblend=2499C6165E7AC788247A4316383838C7C7C7

Incidentally, there are other colour selector tools out there. Color Combos allows you to type a web address in and see what colours they are using. That means you can see what colour schemes eBay, Microsoft, Tesco and Amazon are using!

You can also use a picture to derive a colour scheme. For example, let's say we are looking to design a niche website for golf enthusiasts and we wanted to use an image like this one of a golfer (note: it is copyrighted so make sure you use original photos if you are designing a golf website. Head over to DeGraeve where you can enter an URL of an image and derive a set of colour schemes.

Remember that website colour schemes are similar to any other. Would you paint your kitchen red, blue, green, yellow and orange just because you could? If you wouldn't do it in your home, why do it on a site?

Take this site for example. Pink, white and grey. For this, I imagine a minimalist room in a house with white walls, touches of grey here and there, and subtle pink lighting around the edges or say, around a focal point such as a television (it would have to be a massive 40" widescreen TFT LCD television!). Incidentally, this image of a T-Mobile shop (from Ciiid Architectural Presentations) is close to what I had in mind:



In the style of Phoebe from Friends, if you want to see me produce a room like that, buy me a house so I can do it!

Other changes include a better menu colour scheme which ties in nicely with the site, and a search facility on every page.

There is no longer a picture of a road at the top and hence the banner ad has disappeared. This has pros and cons but is generally for the better.

The next lecture will explains some mind games I have introduced on the site so as to appeal to more people and to encourage more purchases made from the site!