Max Distro LLC Las Vegas Web Design and Software Development Blog

Proper use of color in your website design is of paramount importance. The wrong color scheme may drive away traffic while an ideal color scheme can help foster user retention and sales. Mostly due to social conditioning, colors can influence moods or help convey certain thoughts and evoke emotion. A simple example is signal light colors. After generations of people using them, the colors themselves have assumed the meaning of the signal light… red has been translated stop, or a bad status. Yellow denotes caution or the need for heightened alert or attention, and green of course is for go, and can also mean good or convey the notion of good status.

I have personally witnessed lawyers use colors to try and convey these feelings in a court case:
The incident involved parties from two vehicles, the offenders in a green car and the victims in a red car. While drawing up a diagram of the incident, the prosecuting attorney slyly had the witnesses use a red marker to draw the position of offenders’ vehicle (the green car) and a green marker for the victims’ vehicle (the red car) By the time the defense attorney had realized what the prosecuting attorney was up to made a motion to object, the precedent had been set and the judge ruled that the color selections would stand as they were, so as to not confuse the jurors.
This was defiantly a shrewd maneuver on the part of the prosecuting attorney, and you should keep such things in mind while considering colors of font text and backgrounds for your website.

Here are some tips on how colors may influence and affect people:

Red is linked to blood, fire, strength and passion, and can also denote danger. If used sparingly on a light background color, it may be used to entice attention and highlight.

Blue is the largest leading color and it could denote confidence, loyalty and authority. The darker end may allude to strength, while the lighter shades may be used to express fantasy and dream. Blue may also mean depth, professionalism, trust and honor. Dark blue is used by myriads corporate companies, but this color could also be construed as cold.

Green is linked to trees, money and envy. The larger calming color in the spectrum, it is a favorite with web-sites that are associated with nature. The color green could summarize instincts of durability, safety and harmony. It is also a sound color to use to emphasize calm and relaxation.

Yellow could be a superlative color to bring attention to certain aspects of a web page. It could be linked with happiness and summer, and conversely to caution and the need for alertness. The color yellow could also symbolize wealth, joy optimism and activity. Using yellow in web design is a famous style to make components stand out from the rest of the site.

Black is a very notorious, background color as it displays other colors very well. It is associated with feeling of sexiness, style, elegance and power. The color black can also evoke feelings of evil and mourning. Rock bands usually use black backgrounds because of its association with the dark side and anger.

White is linked with simple and clean designs, so it is favored by legions design companies. It conjures up instincts of cleanliness, simplicity, honesty and innocence. The color white is very common in design web-sites like interior design and graphic design. It may create a feeling of spaciousness and it is linked to peace, simplicity, purity and light.

Gray can be a strange color as it is not very strong. Gray can be connected to respect, humility, decay and boredom. It is used a lot to create shiny gradients in website design to give a slick, up to date feel to a website. It is used heavily on technology websites.

Orange is associated with fire, enthusiasm, heat and danger. But it is also a very friendly and youthful color that is used frequently in web sites aimed at youth. Orange is strongly related to spirituality and healing. It is the color that symbolizes Buddhism and as such, it has assumed a healing initiative about it. It is a bold color that is not as bright as yellow yet not as deep as red.

In website design, purple is an underused color, doubtlessly because it can be remarked as a feminine color. The color is also linked to royalty, indulgence, luxury, romance and wisdom.
The color brown is associated with tradition, stability, depth and nature. But it is very similar to green in the fact that it is also related to trees, mother earth and calm.

The role of color is not just to give the website an appearance that is pleasing to the eye. It may be used to evoke senses and emotions from the end user. Choosing colors that irritate the user will have damaging effects on your site traffic, while selecting color cleverly can convey the professionalism the user expects. The psychology of color may play a massive role in creating a successful web site. The ability to subliminally create an expectation amongst the user may be a powerful sales tool. Selecting colors without thought may inadvertently put users off the site. Creating color schemes that guide users to an end goal could generate more sales and make the whole user experience stress free.

The goal of many website owners is to attain a higher search ranking. What they often don’t realize is that, if done correctly, the optimization site search engines can compliment optimization for users.
This means more people will find the website, which can translate to increased sales and/or lead generation. The following tips will help web site owners optimize their websites to achieve the higher search engine rankings they need.

Perform Keyword Research
Before you begin to design your website, you should perform some keyword analysis research to identify which keyword phrases your site should target. Using publicly available tools such as Word tracker, you can identify the keywords and key phrases relevant to your business that are searched most frequently, then you can specifically target those phrases.
Keyword research is also crucial for your site’s usability. While writing your site’s content try to incorporate using the keywords and phrases your customers search for, and you’ll literally be speaking the same language as your customers.
For example, you might choose to target the phrase, “sell ring tones”, because that’s what your website does. Keyword research would undoubtedly show you that web users are actually searching for “buy ring tones.” By using the phrase, “buy ring tones” on your website’s pages, you’ll be using the same words as your customers and they’ll be able to find what they’re looking for more easily.

Use Appropriate Page Titles
Many search engines place more importance on the page title than on any of the page’s other attributes. If the title adequately describes the content of that page, search engines will be able to more accurately determine what that the focus of the page is about.
A relevant page title also helps site visitors figure out where they are while navigating your website. The page title is the first thing that loads up, in most cases quite a few seconds before the content does so a descriptive, keyword-rich page title can be a real boon to user orientation and site navigation.

Use Headings and Sub-Headings
The opening paragraph should describe the page content. Search engines love content, but many engines are especially fond of the first 25 words on each page. Create an opening paragraph that adequately lays out the content of the rest of the page, or the site, in the case of the homepage. Try to incorporate your important key words and key phrases in this crucial area. By doing this you can give, both your users, and the search engines the information they are looking for.
When a user arrives at a web page the first thing the web user needs to know is whether or not this page has the information they are looking for. A good way to find out is to read through the first paragraph. If the opening paragraph sufficiently describes the page content, and the user finds a lead to the information they were looking for, they will almost certainly continue to search out the page or the website for the wanted information, product(s), or service(s).

Descriptive Link Text
Most search engines place a lot of significance on the link text. Search engines presume that link text will be descriptive of its target and, as such, examine the link text for all links that point to any page. If all the links that point to a page about car alarms read ‘click here for more info’, the search engines can’t gain any information about that page without visiting it. Conversely, if all the links read ‘about car alarms’, search engines can easily deduce what that page is about.
Descriptive links are also incredibly important for usability. If web users scan, rather than read, a massive amount of ‘click here’ links on the page will be worthless to them. Descriptive links act like signposts and land marks to scanning users. As the user looks down the page, they understand immediately where the link ‘about car alarms’ leads.

Avoid Using Frames
Usage of frames is quite an old technique, and although the practice is not as commonplace as it once was, they’re still out there. Using frames is commonly seen to be disadvantageous to your search engine ranking, because most search engines can’t follow links between frames.
Even if a search engine does index your pages, and Web users find you through a search engine, they will usually be taken to one of the pages within the frame. This page will probably be a content page with no navigation (navigation is normally contained in a separate frame) and, therefore, no way for the user to navigate to any other page on the site.
Frames are also disadvantageous for usability, as they can cause problems with the browser’s back button, printing, history and bookmarking. To put simply, try to steer clear of frames in your design.

Provide Quality Content
This may seem like a strange quality of a search-optimized website, but it’s actually very crucial. Search engines, in addition to page content, look at the number of links pointing into web pages. Often, the more inbound links a website has, and all other things being equal, the higher in the search rankings it will appear.
By providing new, creative, unique and regularly updated content on your website, other webmasters will want to link to your site. This practice provides extra value to their site visitors, and of course, you’ll also be adding value for your site visitors.
Optimizing your Website for both search engines and users shouldn’t have to be a trade-off. There is a significant amount of overlap between the tasks required to reach these two objectives, and this overlap can be used to your benefit.

There a number of signs that may tell you that you need to hire a professional web designer to redesign your website. Some of these signs include:

• Losing users as quickly as they arrive to your site
• Users exiting continuously on the same page
• Your site is not appearing on popular search engines,
  or buried many pages deep within the search results.

A professional web designer is the best person you can hire for your online business if you realize that there is something wrong with your site.  Many businesses fail online, and they don’t give their site a chance by having a web designer look at it before throwing in the towel. There are ways to tell why a site is not doing well online. A designer can do the research required to determine why the website is not doing well, and what needs to be done to correct the problems.

If you notice that users never stay on your site for longer than a few seconds after they arrive on the home page then you may need to change a few things. A professional web designer can assess what problems might be causing users to leave. These problems may be simple, like the wrong colors that are too bright for the users eyes, or a page that takes too long to load.

If your website has a lot of traffic but you discover they all exit from the website on the exact same page, then maybe there is something wrong with that page.  A professional web designer can help fix ailing pages and make them perfect, so they retain the users rather than run them off. If you have users come to your site and they leave upon arriving then you should hire a designer.

One of the biggest problems that cause websites to fail is that they do not rank at all or rank well on the search engine results. A successful company will always have a decent rank. A decent rank is at least on the first or second page within the results of the search engines using industry specific keywords about the information, products, and services offered by your company.

There are many signs you might be experiencing that should throw up a red flag that you need to hire a professional web designer to assist you with your online business. You may notice users leave your site as soon as they arrive, or on a specific page. You may not even be able to find your website on the search engines or it may be buried pages deep, under tons of higher ranked websites. If your online business experiences any of these things then you need to hire a professional web designer to breathe new life into your website and turn the company around.

SEO activity can be divided in to two broad categories, offsite SEO and onsite SEO.
Onsite SEO refers to all the methods used in the design and presentation of your site in order to boost its appeal to search engines and indexing. Onsite SEO includes adjusting many factors that can increase the quality of information search engines obtain when visiting your site.  There is no magic formula for these elements, but using them all appropriately can lead to significant improvements in search engine rankings.  Onsite SEO factors include (but are not limited to):

1. Check for broken links within your site.
2. Choice of text within HTML META description tag.  This should be unique for each page on your site.
3. Choice of text within HTML title tags.  This should be unique for each page on your site.
4. Strong relevant internal linking.  Breadcrumb style sub-navigation on pages can strengthen internal linking.
5. Choice of text within HTML h# tags (for example, <h1> or <h3> tags).  Do not overuse h1 tags, use one per page.
6. Customize 404 pages to include links back to principal areas of your site’s navigation structure.
7. Keyword density within HTML body tags.  Historically, a density of 3% to 5% evenly distributed on pages of over 200 words was thought to be near optimal, although this is near impossible to objectively assess.
8. Use Keywords in HTML <strong> tags.
9. Use an up-to-date XML sitemap.
10. Use an up-to-date HTML sitemap.
11. Place target keywords high up on the page.
12. Use unique and relevant HTML ALT tags on all images.

Offsite SEO refers to the process used to improve search engine rankings by maximizing the influence of factors outside your site’s home domain.  For example: building relevant inbound links from other domains/sites.  The principal object of offsite SEO is quality link building.  Link building has evolved to become a full and separate discipline within SEO. Ordinarily, onsite SEO should be undertaken before proceeding to offsite SEO efforts and are usually quicker and easier to perform.  Offsite SEO efforts are usually divided in to mid- to long-term projects as it takes time to build up a sizable amount of back links.

As a business owner, regardless of the type of business, whether it’s a sole proprietorship or a multinational corporate juggernaut – you need a website. The Internet is so ever-present that both your current customers and potential customers expect you to have a website, and look with suspicion upon those companies that don’t have a presence on the internet.

When you want to launch a website or revamp the website you already have, where do you turn? Clearly, most people don’t have the skills necessary to design their own web site, nor the interest to learn how to become a website designer. Besides, you wouldn’t want to leave your company’s image in the hands of an amateur. You really need a professional web page designer – more specifically, a business web page designer.  You’re looking for Max Distro, LLC.

Design
Our designer is second to none, visit our portfolio and see for yourself.  We can work with you to make the site that you have been dreaming about a reality. Or, you can give us a few guidelines, then we will set our designer loose to create a few sample layouts for you to choose from.

Customization
Max Distro, LLC can customize your web site to the extent you need. Perhaps you’d like distinctive headers and graphics on each page. Maybe you’d like to add photo albums, flash introductions, or other design features. Our team has the ability to integrate almost any customization you desire.

Specialized Solutions
Each business is unique, our development team can help your business accomplish your particular online goals by implementing E-commerce solutions, such as, shopping carts, and SSL certificates.

Web Hosting
A beautiful, professionally developed website is wonderful, but unless you own your own server, you’re probably going to need a web hosting service. Max Distro, LLC offers free hosting for three months to new customers and offers very competitive rates after the introductory period.

Marketing and Tracking
It’s important to optimize your web site so that your customers will be able to find you. It’s also crucial to know how many people visit your website, which web pages they visit, and other analytics.  Max Distro, LLC wants to see your site get off on the right foot, which is why we offer free SEO services for the first 3 months for any site designed and developed by our team.

If you are a website owner, then you have already gone through what can be, depending on your website, a lengthy process of design and development. But you are going to need exposure. Why should you spend the time, money, and effort to build something great, if people won’t even know it exists? What you need now is Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short. Search engine optimization can help you score well with leading search engines like Google and Yahoo. I want take this time to share some tips that you can use on your website to finally increase your traffic. Keep in mind though I’m not going to reveal the Colonel’s secret recipe in its entirety. For that you should consult with an SEO expert who can tailor a campaign for your website.

Importance of incoming links

You will need a lot of incoming links to stand a chance of being highly ranked on the major search engines. List your website with free and paid directories. You should not expect alot of traffic from these directories, but what you should expect is relevancy for the major engines. The engines take you more seriously when you have quality links pointing into your website.  Some good places to start with directory submissions are improvinglinks.com and strongestlinks.com. Both of these websites list great directories and provide information on them.

Use link exchanges

A great way to get incoming links is to exchange links with quality websites having a similar theme to your website. Major engines such as Google will reward your website with higher rankings. Linkmarket and Value Exchange (free) are good places to start with link exchanges.

Help with and be helped by forum chat

Not only can you get good tips and advice from forums, you can post answers to people’s questions, helping others while you help yourself. Forums are another place where you can increase traffic to your website, all you have to do is remember to leave your link at the end of each post. Most likely, you are not allowed to blatantly advertise in forums, but you can leave a catchy signature, which should contain a link back to your website, and that will lead to a click.

Blogs away

You can also use blogs to increase your traffic. It’s another way to tell your clients and customers about what’s going on in your industry. You will achieve even more exposure, and gain relevance while at the same time helping people out with useful information about your business. If you want to use a blog successfully, try having a form that your readers can fill out for questions or feedback. Once again… you will receive repeat traffic. You can find out what real every people are looking and apply that data in your sales and marketing campaigns.

Article submission

Submitting your articles to directories is another great way to gain exposure for your website. People read your quality articles and check your site out. Remember to leave your by-line information (i.e. about author) at the end of your article, that way if someone reprints your article in full, your name and website URL are there. When your article appears on someone else’s site, you can gain traffic if they click your link after reading the article. Another added bonus is that you have an incoming link from the web site that is using your article.

Build company/client relationships with newsletters

Having your own newsletter will gain repeat traffic. People who sign up already like you and they are willing to hear what you have to say. It would be sheer folly overlook the value of having a quality newsletter.

Continue adding quality content

Want to keep gaining higher placement on the search engines? Just keep adding more new content with great keywords. The more relevant the content, the better you will fare with the search engines.

If you are not currently doing so, using any or all of these methods should raise your site traffic significantly.