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It's Tuesday and that means it's time for another selection of Quick Tips. This is now the third post in this series. If you've missed any of the earlier instalments, you can find them here. Posts tagged with Quick Tips.Colour schemes
When you're trying to decide on a colour scheme for your site, you need to think about which colours go well together. You can't just pick any old colours or your site won't look that great.Fortunately, there is a handy tool that will assist you in finding colours that go well together. Check it out: ColorSchemer - Online Color Scheme Generator. There are others too, but this is my favourite.
Basically, click on a colour you like, and you'll be given a palette of colours that should work well together. Want to make the palette lighter or darker? Simple - just use the "Lighten Scheme" and "Darken Scheme" buttons on the left.
If you want to save the current palette, make a note of the six characters beneath the top left colour - when you first go to the site, you'll see this is #3366FF. Next time you visit the site, enter these six characters into the box on the left-hand side, and click Set Hex.
Ah, but how do you use the colours? That's something for a proper tutorial - if you're interested, leave me a comment and I'll see what I can do.
Choosing fonts
When you're choosing fonts for your site, be careful not to use anything too fancy. The fonts on your computer may not exist on the computers of your visitors. This is rather frustrating as it limits you to a small number of fonts. Here are some of the ones you can use:Arial
Arial Narrow
Courier
Courier New
Georgia
Tahoma
Times New Roman
Trebuchet MS
Verdana
However, the choices are different depending on your operating system - visitors who use a Mac rather than a PC with Windows will probably see things quite differently.
The best advice I can give you is to keep it simple. If you wish, choose one font for your headers and one for your content, and possibly a different one in your logo or banner (more on that in a moment). But you shouldn't use more than three different fonts on your site. Two is probably best. Anything else just looks messy.
Use your own banner
Many blogging and website systems provide a number of themes that will make your site look OK, but not great. There are some good themes out there too. But the problem is that any generic theme has almost certainly been used by hundreds of other sites already. Using generic themes will not help your site to stand out.At the very least, use your own banner at the top to show that the site is yours and not just another site with a blue background at the top.
If you need help, there are lots of sites out there that can help you with a good design. At the moment though, I don't have a list of designers to recommend, so if anyone wants to suggest someone - please go right ahead. Thanks in advance.
What do you think?
As always, feedback on my tips is very welcome. Please contact me if you have any suggestions for future tips. Thanks!Tags: quick tips, colour schemes, fonts, banners, design
Posted by Ben on February 19, 2008 22:05 / Edited: Never
Comments
2
Hi ettarose, thanks for the comment and praise. I just put up my first Blogger tutorial. I'm not sure how many I'll be doing, but I'd like to do some more tutorials for the various blogging platforms on the net. Let me know if you have any specific suggestions and I'll see what I can do. :)
3
I like working on skins for my proboard. My husband helps with the hex and finding a color from a photograph used as the banner. It is great to actually have a scheme like that, though we try to do something like that as best we can. Can't wait to try it. We used platypus website before.
4
Hi MyThreeDaughters, welcome and thanks for the comment. :)
Ben, your advice is so simple but as always right on. I love visiting your site and I try to follow your tips. I have changed my template and tried to keep down on the ads.I do read your posts and have even re read your tutorials. I wish you could do more on blogspot, but that is just me. I always have problems changing code to put something in the template. No biggy.