Choosing the right colours for your site is really important, since it's really the first impression that visitors to you will get. 
It can be really easy to get carried away and use loads of colours everywhere, because you want a site to be colourful, but there are ways to get a colourful result without it all clashing.
Basically, the trick is this - drop the number of colours you use. This, in the end will have a much greater impact than using all the colours there are on one page. Most of our sites are quite colourful, but is restricted to shades of similar colour. Again, sounds bad, but you just have to see it!
What we are saying is, try to maintain a colour style throughout your site and keep the colour count down a little. When you choose colours try to imagine what you'd think if your living room was done out like the colours you've chosen. If you wouldn't want to spend much time in it - think again!

Lastly, try to use non-colour colours as well, i.e. black and white. These draw attention towards the colours you ARE using, which means you can use colour more sparingly to give greater impact. They are great as background colours too.

If you would like to offer us feedback , please email us. Have fun!

Websites are often deadly slow to load. Here we're going to tell you some issues pertaining to it. We'll cover the reasons for a slow-loading site and what we do about it.

Why Sites are Slow

The main reason that sites are slow is that when using a modem, the Internet has a really slow data transfer rate. The "world wide wait" is very unforgiving of sites with a lot of information on. We're not talking about content, we're talking about the size of the files.

The main culprits are big image files. Now big image files in the print world are around 30-100Mb - huge in other words - but on the web, a big image file is anything over 20Kb. And it adds up: if you have 5 20Kb image files on your homepage, that's a 100Kb download, plus the text file with the code. At a transfer rate of, say, 1Kb/second (not that fast, but not that slow either, in Internet terms), that's getting on for a minute and a half download time. Sloooow! (;-0)

So what can we do?

It should be obvious by now that the way to get a faster download time is either to have fewer images on the page, or to shrink in file size the ones you have.

If you are going to use an image, ask yourself if it really adds something to the page, or is it really unnecessary to the overall effect?

Faced with the fact that you have to use the image in your site, there are several immediate things you can do:

• In you image editor, crop out all the extra space you may have for positioning purposes and replace this with cellpadding in a table. Code is a much more economical way to do it. If you can, reduce the physical size of the image.

• Use JPEG (.jpg) files for photographic-type images and compress them on saving down to a size that is acceptable. In Photoshop 4, try to get the slider down to 2 for good compression levels. There will be a loss in quality, so this may take some experimenting!
  

• When you export a GIF that's really quite simple, say a menu option, but the dialogue box is telling you that it needs 256 colours (or other really high numbers), try manually pushing down the number of colours in the image a bit. This sometimes turns out dreadfully, but it often makes little difference.
  

• For animated GIFs, try to reduce to a minimum the number of frames that the animation takes. Fewer frames - smaller filesize.

One great bit of kit is the online service Gif Wizard. This is a compression program that you access via the web. You just tell it where on your hard drive or website the image to be compressed is, and let it do its stuff. It will give you several options; you just pick the one with the best filesize saving against the degradation of the image. This service is not free, but it's well worth the small investment if you're doing a lot of web work.

The Last Word

Hopefully, if you follow these tips, you site will load a lot quicker. It does make a real difference to the end viewing experience! There are, of course, things you can do nothing about, like slow servers, net congestion etc - Well recently VSNL has greatly increased its speed. Say thanks to VSNL. But incase of some private ISP's its a nightmare to surf graphics flooded sites.

Choose your Mood

The first thing to do is pin down what the basic message you're trying to convey is. This sounds easy, but it can be a real pain!
For a homepage, for instance, the message you're conveying at its basic level is your personality. Something very beautiful for you may be sheet for others. (Sorry but that's it what I have experienced personally)
Corporate sites for firms are in many ways easier. They tend to be quite restrained, and take fewer risks. They are there to give confidence to the surfer that this firm is the one out of many to be TRUSTED to give them what they need.
Of course, some firms want to seen as risk takers, and we try to talk to the company as much as possible to get a feel for how they see themselves. They will also often have an existing look in their printed material that they will want reflected in their site. An online presence is not the same as a printed brochure, though, and you can sometimes push it quite far. You may find that the people in the company you're talking to don't feel that the printed stuff fits their image, but you should try and achieve some level of consistency between the two, unless they specifically request otherwise! 
OK, we'll assume that you've chosen a basic mood - here's how to get there!

Background colours

It breaks down like this:

• For a site that is quite down in mood, or meant to be "cool", then the best bet is black.
• For one that is up or fairly corporate, choose white.

That's the basic rule. Obviously, rules are meant to be broken, but as a rule of thumb, that's not bad! (an extra tip - to make a site look quite professional , use either black or white as the background colour - it may be dull, but it's true!)
Chose Black if you have some fancy products (and other "dark" colours)
White (and other "light" colours) for some decent products or services. Remember white colour is associated with some of the world's most boring sites, so be careful.

Warm or Cold colours?

"Cold" colours (blues, greens etc) provoke a sense of being quite "down", while "warm" colours (reds, oranges, yellows) are inviting and more cheerful. For instance, if you combine a cold colour with a black background, you're definitely sending a pretty miserable message. Experiment with different backgrounds and colours.

Refinement

Often the best way to approach this is with use of FONTS. Whether you have them as images or defined in html, fonts can give you the look you're after.
Corporate sites often use Verdana, Times, etc to convey tradition and solidness, whereas more modern sites tend to use Arial, Helvetica, etc which also look best when doing small text, by the way. We prefer Verdana. Use Windows default font only.......Jus Jokin........You know that.
The place to use your Hard fonts is in headings, and titles, not in the body of your text. This is because they're generally hard to read, but the headers should give the mood.
There are free font sites around as well, that have some excellent examples. 
Bright colours like these give the header a modern and cheerful feel, but the mix of fonts stops it being too offensively happy, and gives it a cool edge!

You'll be pleased to hear that there aren't actually that many things to learn about creating a professional-looking site!

Here we'll take you through the basic things that make the difference between the nastiest personal pages and the professional look we all want. 

Space

What you're aiming for is to draw attention to the important bits - the message, the navigation system or whatever is the main thrust of the page.
People often make the mistake of making these things very big. They don't have to be. The eye needs to be drawn to them, and this is best (and most professionally) achieved by the use of space. Don't clutter your homepage with unnecessary text and images around the main areas, since they detract from the important bits.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that if there's a big white gap in your page that you should fill it with something. Just have the bits that are necessary. The other stuff should probably have its own page if it's that important!

As a rule, maybe only 75% of your page should be covered with images and text.

Consistency

You should aim to keep the look of a site consistent throughout.

This means a standard use of fonts, colours, image styles, layout styles, navigation style etc. 
Your background colours should remain the same throughout, and you should pay attention to the little things like keeping the fonts in the text defined in html. Don't mix fonts too much, however much there's the temptation to do so!
Header images for sections ought to have the same style as each other, which should in turn be related to the main look of the logo (colours, fonts etc).
Colours. Don't pick colours that clash - think about what your living room would look like in the colours you choose, then wonder if you'd like to spend a lot of time there! Define your link colours in the body tag to match your colour scheme as well.

Backgrounds

One of the main culprits for a bad-looking site are these multicoloured background image tiles. They also tend to have a definite pattern to them, which can make text really hard to read.
Try to go for a flat colour background, or for a large image (min 800x600 pixels) which is faded so that you can easily read the text on top of it. (Watch out for the file sizes on these though!) Big fadey text always looks cool, as do black and white photos that have been faded out. Another trick is to blur these backgrounds, since this makes the sharp text on top much easier to read - and it looks really cool too!

Scrolling Text

If you have a page of scrolling text, try to split it up into sections on different pages, and add a navigation system for it. It's just a bit nicer, and keeps the user from getting hideously lost on the page. Avoid those dead ends though! This page is very texty we admit, but these tips are done so you can print them out easily and refer to them!

Images

Watch the file size, but don't make them look horrible on export, or there's no point in them - find a happy compromise. You shouldn't really have an image file bigger then 30k anywhere - and that's for a REALLY big picture. Keep images so that they stay on even the smallest screen, i.e. around 400 pixels across max.
The trick with layout is to use tables. They also resize to an extent with the browser size.
Think about the layout of a magazine (I am talking about Chip Magazine and not PC-Quest). it tends to have columns and areas with background colours to provide focus. The same applies here. You can pull quotes out of a body of text and make them the focal point for it. They also break up a big lump of text really well, which is always a good thing!
Look around the web, and you'll find many examples of both bad and good sites. Bear in mind what you just read when you look at them, and try to see why the bad ones are so awful!