The Flesch Reading Ease test. The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level test. The Gunning Fog Index. The Coleman Liau Index. The SMOG Index. The Automated Readability Index. All are designed to show the level of education necessary for readers to understand a passage of written English.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? I mean, after all: getting your message across to the widest possible audience is what marketing is all about. If you could know in advance with greater certainty that your message posed no serious obstacles to reader comprehension, you’d be in clover, right? Well, hold on there a minute.

In this Age of Unbelief, even believers want the assurance of scientific validation. Tests like these are part of a trend to quantify anything and everything – even that which was once understood to be unquantifiable. We take comfort in numbers. Yardsticks. Testable phenomena. Repeatable results.

The tests I’ve listed above all use mathematical formulas to assess readability. For the most part, they count the number of characters in a passage, the number of words, the number of sentences, the average number of characters per word, the average number of syllables per word, the average number of words per sentence, and so on. The lower the numbers, generally speaking, the higher the readability for the greatest number of people.

I know from my professional associations that most writers feel as I do about these tests: we distrust them. Advertising and marketing firms tend to look on them warily as well. Why? Because, in spite of what their creators and advocates maintain, the tests aren’t accurate. Nor could they be.

Nothing so complex as “readability,” or “reader comprehension,” can be reduced to a set of numerical constructs. No mathematical equation, no arbitrary assignment of numerical values, can tell you unequivocally what readers are, or are not, taking away from something you’ve written.

Readability, simply put, is governed by too many variables. And many of those variables can never be known with confidence, precisely because they are unquantifiable.

Aside from basic intelligence, education surely plays the most significant role in readability. But all kinds of social/psychological factors also come into play. The length of words and sentences? Yes, that too has an effect. But many of the most familiar words, words that even less-educated readers recognize, have three, four – sometimes more! – syllables. A one-syllable word might score better on a Flesch test, but it wouldn’t be as apt for the audience. Beyond that, there are times when only a long sentence, well-constructed, can accurately and coherently convey an idea. To split that long sentence up would be to muddy or destroy the relationship between various components of the thought being expressed. Result? Reader confusion.

Now, I don’t say readability tests are completely without value. They can alert a writer to wordiness. And writers are always best advised to keep copy brief. Especially when writing for mass audiences.

A handful of paragraphs looks friendly. Short sentences read well. Monosyllabic words pack a punch. They’re just not always the most expressive way to communicate. Attempts at the kind of brevity these tests promote – especially by beginning or unskilled writers – often leave copy wanting. The text may be short. But it shortchanges readers because it lacks the detail that brings color and clarity; that inspires and motivates.

In the end, it’s experience that serves as a far better guide to readability than any numerically based readability test. Experienced writers and marketers know how to address different audiences; they know what engages and motivates people of different ages, in different professions, at different social levels, with different interests and inclinations. They know because countless times over their copy’s been tested in the fires of the marketplace. They’ve seen what doesn’t work. And they’ve seen what does – as evidenced in growing customer bases and greater sales, among other signs.

If numbers have anything to do with the readability of marketing copy, these are the numbers that count.

To highlight this point, the folks at Brafton have produced a fantastic infographic on the matter. The stats should open even the reluctant marketers’ eyes to the value of generating quality content. Businesses pay attention – “content is king!”

Still not creating content on your website? Can’t create content on your website? Not sure how, please investigate our Web Development, Search Engine Optimization, or Writing Services or  call us at 1-877-817-4443 or email us today.

Editorial Calendars are one of a number of things you can do to improve your productivity when working on your internet marketing activities. Unless you work for a company that really understands how online visibility can impact your bottom line, more likely than not there are a number of people managing your social media presence as a part of their jobs.

Whether your organization’s commitment to online marketing is minimal or extensive, or your resources available to assign to those efforts are scarce or vast – an editorial calendar can be a great tool to make your efforts more effective.

The title of this post came from Andy Welfle, who blogs for Pencils.com and was a panelist at the Fort Wayne Social Media Breakfast (@SMBFW / #SMBFW) earlier this week. Speaking from experience, I agree with his sentiment – that while an editorial calendar can be set with the best of intentions in mind, if it is not implemented correctly it can do more to hinder your productivity than to help it.

Let’s start by looking at what it takes to be an effective online marketing manager:

• Creativity: hopefully you (or members of your team) are generating new, compelling content. To get that accomplished you must have at least one creative bone in your body!
• Determination: Nothing happens online without some effort, whether you’re trying to improve your search engine optimization, improve your audience in social media, or gain recognition as a subject matter expert in your industry. Identifying the areas you have an opportunity to improve your online visibility and attacking them, leaving no stone unturned, is critical to achieve your goals.
• Discipline: If you’ve had any success building an audience it takes regular updates to maintain that audience. Consistent updates with compelling content are critical, and it helps if that content is optimized for keywords that you are using to attract attention to your website.

Looking at those traits they seem counter-intuitive. It’s rare that you’ll find anyone that has these traits in equal proportion. I have a hard time finding people that have more than one of these traits. An editorial calendar can be used as a resource to spur creative ideas, focus your determination, or help enforce disciplined updates.

The key to using an editorial calendar effectively is to look at your operations and figure out how to implement its use in a way that compliments the work style of the folks working for your organization. The first step along this path would be to do some analysis of your resources that your organization can commit to your online marketing efforts. Use whatever tool you want to process this data, I prefer to use SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) but there are lots of options there. Here are the key questions you need to answer:

1. Where are there opportunities to enhance your online visibility?
2. What factors make you different from your competition?
3. Who is available to help improve your visibility?
4. How much time do they have available to commit to this effort?
5. When are they available to help?

The next step is to outline a program that is actually going to fit the rhythm of your organization, particularly those who are going to be in a position to help with this effort. If you are leading a department and everyone in the department is going to have some role in this, it may be as simple as doling out assignments and putting them on a board. Not every organization is so lucky! In fact, even if they are your employees, sometimes just handing out assignments isn’t going to be the best way to get their participation. I know from experience we tried something similar at our office – it wasn’t very effective.

So how do you implement this? It depends on your situation. Here are a couple of scenarios where an editorial calendar can be useful with some tips for that particular environment:

• Corporate environment: The particular circumstances of this environment will vary from organization to organization, but a common challenge I’ve observed in any business is communication. Your editorial calendar can be a touchstone that every element of the organization can use to understand resource allocation and improve effective participation in your online marketing efforts.
• Team blogging environment: The amplification that comes from members of a team blog can be blisteringly effective. Use the editorial calendar to not only understand when you will be publishing content, but when to amplify that content via social media marketing channels. Remember that automated tools may not be the best method for doing this – by varying when and how the content is amplified as well as within which networks it is amplified to, you’ll be able to better promote the content being developed and will drive more traffic as a result.
• Planning a multichannel marketing strategy: The more elements you try to coordinate the more important it is to have a common frame of reference. You may be a one-person team, but understanding what you are going to do and when you’re going to do it is important just for setting personal deadlines for content development as well as recognizing what elements of your online marketing strategy are working better than others. An editorial calendar paired up with Google Analytics and a social media analysis tool like Crowdbooster can help you spend your time more effectively without sacrificing impact.

The important thing to remember is to not etch your editorial calendar in stone. Recognize upfront that there are other things going on in your organization or your personal life that may take priority over drawing attention to what you’re doing online. When I develop a calendar for general content updates I use it as a guide and try to stick to it as best I can. That said, if I’m developing an editorial calendar around a campaign, it’s important to you assign dates carefully and in a manner that ensures you’ll be able to meet them because you will have people who are depending on you successfully meeting assigned dates for different content elements.

What has been your experience with using an editorial calendar? Leave a comment with any questions you might have about making effective use of editorial calendars, or any tips or tricks you’ve found help make them work more effectively for you.

• I was born screaming and bald in Fort Wayne, Indiana, way back in 1989.
• I graduated high school in 2008 and proceeded to meander around the country working different jobs in Indiana, Illinois, and Oklahoma – finally settling down to go to college back in Fort Wayne.
• I’ve been dating the same girl since 2005. Maybe we’ll get married some day.
• I live in a house with 5 other single guys called “The Mension,” and we all cook and clean (ladies?).
• Last summer I got on a bicycle and, along with 31 other college students from around the United States, rode from Charleston, South Carolina, to Santa Cruz, California.

Now that we’re all well acquainted, let me take a minute to say this:

If you’re scared to write a blog for your website because writing the English language scares you, I have good news for you…

You’re probably wrong.

It stings a little, doesn’t it? But that’s okay – we’re all wrong, and it’s good to know you’re not alone.

We’ve just had our first fight. I’m glad we got that awkward moment out of the way.

Anyways, we are all wrong because of pretentious, rich Englishmen that thought when they opened their mouths they sounded better than those petty poor people over there with no teeth and bad diets.

That’s why I’m an English major – you get to spend the rest of your foreseeable future correcting people. It’s great fun…

“No, it should be ‘their,’ not ‘there’ or ‘they’re.’”

“Really, it’s ‘Kevin and I,’ not ‘Kevin and me.’”

“The plural of syllabus is syllabuses, not syllabi. Oh, it’s not? You speak fluent Latin and
understand its syntax, phonology, morphology, and lexicon? I didn’t think so.”

“Please, refrain from using the word ‘warsh’ when we all know it is ‘wash.’”

I rest my case.

Most people are afraid to write anything because they’re scared of “the standard” of the English language and their lack of knowledge about it. But what is “the standard?” Fear not, for I have good news for you, my friends. “The standard” is bogus.

It’s bogus because language is always changing, and there is nothing any of us can do to stop it. There’s a saying that goes like this, “The standard is set by those with the money and the guns.” Essentially, the rich and powerful (identifiable because they never pronounce their “r’s”) get to say what’s right and wrong.

In reality, all of these language books and classes, these grammarians, exist because if we can define our language and how it works, we can keep it from changing. But change is good! If change didn’t happen we would still be writing like this:

Faeder ure þu þe eart on heofonum…

Recognize that? I didn’t think so.

It’s Old English for “Our Father, which art in heaven…” The same language we speak today, just older and changed.

If we successfully stopped language from changing, we’d still be writing and talking like that. Anyone still want to cram your grammar down our throats?

Let’s be honest. If your website has a blog page, you can’t afford not to be producing content. Content gets you found, establishes credibility, and maintains a voice in your market and industry. Why let “the standard” keep your company from being all that it can be?

I’m glad we finally met. Hopefully I didn’t make you too angry, you enjoyed these thoughts on language (blasphemous as they were), and you are a little less afraid to open your mouth or put a pen to paper in fear of being incorrect. Because you’re probably right.

Read the rest of the Musings here…

For the optimization of a blog, the All in One SEO Pack should be considered a “must have” for blog writers. Fundamentals of the pack include in the ability to edit the title, description and keywords of a blog post. For new users of WordPress, this plugin provides out-of-the-box workability. After installing, a user can access main features immediately, without the need for additional configuration. And for an advanced user, it supports a variety of features to fine-tune its integration on a blog, such as canonical URLs and title formatting.

And for blog writing? Well, develop your personal blogging style with attention to a few tips found in this blog post. These can help out in key areas such as readability and tone.

All in One SEO Pack

Under the settings menu, there are options to edit the home title, description and keywords of a blog. This will allow for quick optimization of a home page, without the need to edit files. When writing a title for either a home page or a blog post, keep the message clear and to the point. As the pack suggests, search engines use a maximum of 60 characters in the title. Being able to provide a concise message, within the restrictions of character count, is one approach to writing effectively with this package.

Search engines use the description field to provide a snippet on a results page. Again, try to be clear and concise while ensuring that the description is below or at 160 characters. Writing effectively for both the title and description helps keep a uniform and clean format throughout a blog. And when search engine users find this content, the title and description will both adequately convey the topic and message of the post, while conforming to standards.

The All in One SEO Pack will also use keywords automatically with associated blog tags. However, this section is not as “mission critical” as ensuring that a clear and concise title and description are present. However, make sure that both the associated tags and keywords reflect the topical meaning of a post.

Blog Writing

Aside from writing the title and description concisely, it can take years of work at writing to develop fluency in tone, delivery and style. And to develop one’s own writing style, the best approach is most certainly hard work and commitment. A well-respected and prolific English novelist, Anthony Trollope, who was popular for writing The Eustace Diamonds, would dutifully write 250 words of a novel each day and would never skip a day of writing.

Trollope’s personal quotes reflect his feelings about writing,

“There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily” and “Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.”

As one starts to develop their style of writing, they will start to notice the intrinsic qualities of their style. They’ll be able to edit on the word and sentence level more aptly, to convey a concise and overarching message throughout a piece of work. As one starts to get better at writing and editing, they’ll be able to develop and refine their tone to reach and captivate a varied audience-but it starts with hard work, and a commitment to writing.

As you may know, writing for a blog is somewhat different from website content writing. To develop a style of blog writing, approach a target audience with informality and a conversational tone. Essentially, effective blog writing conveys your own conversational tone and a passion for a given topic. Once you are finished writing, read the post aloud and slowly, paying attention to the syllables of each word and their overall flow from one word to the next. For example, the following universal English phrase, “the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain” flows well, reads well and has certain resonant sound characteristics, namely assonance and alliteration.

Flesch-Kincaid Formula

One can also gauge the grade level of their writing by looking at the Flesch-Kincaid formula. This assigns a grade level and score to a text, to determine the overall difficulty of reading. Generally, academia reads on a Flesch-Kincaid score of the low 30s, and print/magazine tends to score in the 50s, or at the high-school grade level. It is based on the syllable counts in the text, and the use of simple words versus complex words (monosyllable or disyllable words versus tri-syllable or more).

The Flesch-Kincaid formula is interesting to look at, but not the end-all of writing. Use it as a tool to understand how word usage affects the reading of a text, and how important that can be to determining the ease of reading. Microsoft Word has the ability to score readability statistics using Flesch-Kincaid, if you check “Show readability statistics” under the proofing section in Word options.

Cirrus ABS – Web design and copy from seasoned professionals…

And if you’re looking to have a team of seasoned and professional writers to craft exceptionally written Web copy, we can help. At Cirrus ABS, we meld our team experience into all aspects of Web design, development and copy writing, including the business process and marketing with our award-winning Cirrus eBusiness Suite platform.

Contact Cirrus ABS to learn about our unique Web approach. We’re headquartered in Fort Wayne, Indiana and have been in the business of Web solutions and NetCentered business strategy since 1995. ]]> http://www.cirrusabs.com/blog/writing-for-blogs-and-optimization/feed/ 0 http://www.cirrusabs.com/blog/oh-it%e2%80%99s-you-again-what-are-you-pitching-now/ http://www.cirrusabs.com/blog/oh-it%e2%80%99s-you-again-what-are-you-pitching-now/#comments Tue, 18 May 2010 16:25:55 +0000 Greg Newton http://www.cirrusabs.com/blog/?p=388

In this world of ever increasing value of all the different types of Social Networking available to business, it is vitally important that individuals of these Companies realize that CONSTANT discussion of their products and Services will only turn off potential clients and customers. When individuals use their Social Networking forums such as Facebook, My Space, Twitter, etc….to flood the airwaves with information and advertising on their Companies particular Products and Services, it will have the same effect as that irritating Cousin that goes on and on over the same topic,……In other words, you start to “Tune them out”, and  turn a deaf ear and eye to what they are trying to get across. This is Business suicide in the Social Networking arena. Properly mixing in your message from a business standpoint, as well as keeping the Social Networking “Social”, will help keep your audience engaged in you and what you have to say. This in turn will keep your potential clients from “Turning the Channel” when you put out a message about your Company or Products  on one or all of your Social Networking forums.

It is Very important to stay relevant and in front of your Clients and potential clients through all forms of Media. Social Networking forums are a tremendous tool that can, and should be used to accomplish this.  Just keep in mind the Proverbs quote……”Whatever you do, do it in Moderation”!

“BUT I DON’T WANT TO!”  Yeah, yeah, I know.  I’ve heard ALL the excuses as to why someone says they can’t do social media…literally, all of them.  I don’t have time.  I don’t have anything to say that anyone cares about.  I don’t care what other people have to say.  Social media is too complicated.  I don’t understand it.  It isn’t relevant to MY industry, but I get why it makes sense for EVERYONE else’s.  My kids understand it better than I do and it’s just so frustrating.  My clientele is too old to be using any type of social media outlet, like Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.  My dog ate my social media.

Enough with the excuses already!!!  I wish I could use the parental stand-by and say “Do it.  Because I said so.”  But since that won’t work…let’s talk fact.

As of the moment that I’m writing this blog, there are 5,367,117 people on Twitter.  There are over 12 million professional users using LinkedIn.  I just tried to find out how many people are on Facebook, and I’m not sure anyone really knows, other than to say A LOT—I am seeing numbers around 410 million, some higher, some lower.  There are approximately 400 million people in North America…not just in the US—all of North America.

Let’s just say for examples sake, I am extremely busy (okay, is that an “example” for anyone?), and I own a company but I’m a one-man show.  To make it interesting, let’s say it’s a fairly obscure company—I breed and sell horses.  I personally know nothing about horses…so if I say anything ridiculous about this, please forgive my ignorance…

If I told you that you could get your name in front of people who are actively looking for horses…how many people does that need to be for it to be worth your while?  One?  Ten?  One hundred?  5 million?  410 million?

Just to give you an idea, I jumped over to Facebook while I was writing this and searched “Horse Sale” and I found a livestock company with 1300 fans…would you be a fan of a company that gave you poor service, or in this case, a poor horse?  Looking at their fan page, I can see “testimonials” from past clients—from last month, all the way back…months! 

Now, like I said, I know nothing about horses or where to buy them in Fort Wayne.  So if I did want to buy a horse (I do not)—social media is probably where I’d start.  Not necessarily just searching for a company, right off the bat.  But I might go on Twitter and say “Anyone in Fort Wayne area know where I can buy a horse?”  I’m sure people are going to reply with companies I should and shouldn’t go to—along with links to their websites or social media pages.  And, if I have to Google them and find their social media feeds or the website—that’s okay, I’m going to look you up before I spend money on something like that. 

Do you look things up before you make a large purchase or hire a service company?  I do—every time.  You can find anything online, including reviews, and if I need to spend money with you, I want you to prove to me you are legit and others have been happy using your company.  Search engines now return social media results in the normal results.  When I just Googled a local company, I got their website and their last few Facebook and Twitter results in my results listing. 

To all you who say your clientele is too “old” to be using any type of social media, let alone assuming they don’t know what social media even is—you know what they say when you assume…  Just this weekend, I was at a concert in Fort Wayne and the MC came up to the mic and said “Now, for all you young folks on Facebook and Twitter, follow us by going to #bandname.”  My dad was with me, who happens to be on both Facebook AND Twitter—and he looked at me and said, “Young people?”  Dad, don’t kill me, you’re not THAT old…(kidding, he’s really  not)  Many of my friends parents AND grandparents are on several social media outlets simply because their kids and grandkids are…gotta keep tabs on us somehow, right?  All joking aside, they are not online just to stalk our busy daily activities—they are using it too, sometimes more than normal because they’re retired and have time to do it.  It may not be the norm yet, but we’re getting there—social media is growing for a reason.  In fact, the fastest growing market on Facebook is women, aged 55 and older.  According to one poll I saw, over 50% of all social media users are over the age of 35, with most being over 45 (*disclaimer: I do not think 35 OR 45 is old, please don’t hurt me!).  My point is not to say you should market everything to the older crowds, but don’t discount them either.

If spending a few minutes to create a Facebook fan page, LinkedIn profile or a Twitter account—and updating each maybe a few times each week is too time consuming—please weigh the potential benefits with the least amount of effort.  Would it be great if you could push news as frequently as Fox does?  Sure, but that isn’t realistic.  It doesn’t have to be too time consuming…even ten minutes a day—shoot, ten minutes a week if you’re doing nothing currently.  You can find time for that, even if you got one new client in a year, for ten minutes a week?  That’s 8 ½ hours over a year—one work day.  Seems worth it to me.  You could have set up a few social media accounts in the time it’s taken to read this blog.

If you don’t understand social media or don’t care to, call your kids—they’d probably be able to do it pretty quickly.  Call your grandkids, they can probably do it even faster.  Call Cirrus, we can help you with the strategy.  Sorry to step on Nike’s toes, but JUST DO IT.  And keep Rex away from your computer.

You picked your current web designer for a couple of reasons. Their portfolio looked flashy – they had some unique looking sites and great designs. Oh, and they were cheap; actually very cheap in comparison to some better known competitors. But do they have a business strategy behind their design? Do they understand web best practices? Do they have multiple departments specializing in areas such as search engine optimization, research and development, and business analysis or did you hire Bob from church, your nephew who is going to college for web design, or a 2 person show working out of a spare bedroom in their mom’s house? Or better yet did you just have your IT guy set up the site because he knows all about that “computer stuff” and he’s already on your payroll?  Now ask yourself these questions – would you let your nephew do the taxes or bookkeeping for your business? Is your IT guy well versed in online marketing or just tech savvy? Why do you let your website, your public face to the internet world, have any less importance to you than other aspects of your business? After all, research has shown we spend more time as a society on the internet than doing anything else, well, besides sleeping.

Here are 5 signs that your penny pinching may be costing you money in the long run in lost business.

Roadblocks

Do you have an “enter” page or a flash introduction to your website? If so, you might be deterring potential customers from ever finding out what it is that you do. As a consumer I want efficiency. I am lazy and when I want information, I want it now. When you put up an obstacle, another hoop for me to jump through, I get frustrated which makes me leave. Although you think that video intro is awesome, I could care less. Oh and that music you have in the background, it’s giving me a headache.

The Yuck Factor

Your site looks like it was designed around the birth of the internet. It very well might be because Bob, in fact, did design it and it looks just as bad as that mustard stain on his button down shirt.  The color scheme, pictures, and technology are outdated and hideous. Plus, unlike that Member’s Only jacket from the 80s that you have hanging in your closet, website design doesn’t come back into style. At least the internet hasn’t been around long enough for that to happen. Chances are if your website looks this way I’m either going to think that you’re no longer in business or that you’re a second-rate company that I don’t really want to deal with anyway. After all, the internet is all about image.

Huh? Your company does what?

I landed on your site because you came up on the search engines for what I was interested in. Plus your home page is sprinkled with some words and phrases that are hot buttons for me. Yet I can’t seem to figure out what it is exactly that you do. That and I don’t know what to do next because you haven’t told me. See as a consumer, I need to be told what to do. That’s why I pay $4 for a cup of burnt-tasting coffee at Starbucks and shop at Wal-Mart even though the grocery store down the street has a much better selection of produce. Proper communication is vital to my understanding and taking action. If you aren’t conveying your message appropriately or in a clear and concise manner then you’re probably doing yourself injustice and confusing me. With a less than powerful marketing message you’re falling short which means your website isn’t converting and I’m not buying.

Too Many Choices

Your homepage has way too many images, pictures, links, buttons, advertisements, banners, text, graphics, rotating flash, widgets, etc. You get the point. If your navigation is overly complex with an endless abundance of choices all you’re doing is confusing me. I don’t know what to pay attention to, what’s important, where to click next. Your site should guide me down an intuitive path of correct choices. Too much thinking causes indecisiveness and causes me, your potential customer, to lose focus; which equals you not getting the sale.

Playing Hide-N-Seek

Atlantis is supposedly the greatest civilization that has ever existed.  The problem is that nobody has ever been able to find it.  Your website could be the ultimate information and sales machine but if I’m not landing on it then it doesn’t really count for much. If you aren’t showing up on the first or second page of the search engines for keywords that I’m typing into Google or Yahoo, then what’s your site really worth?  You might as well be parked at the bottom of the ocean next to Atlantis because your company is just a myth. I have to be able to find your website in order for it to produce results.

If your website is suffering from any of these symptoms give us a call at 260-420-2222 or visit our site online at www.cirrusabs.com.  We can help you develop an effective website and strategy.

Since websites do not (correction… should NEVER) include audio that the user doesn’t start themselves, we have to look at the visual equivalent to yelling and how to use it properly. If you have one person in a room speaking loud enough for you to hear, you listen to them and understand what they have to say. If you have 8 people talking at the same time, it doesn’t matter how loudly they are talking, you don’t hear what they have to say. In fact, it makes you want to leave the room.

There are many versions of yelling on the web, so it can be easy to make mistakes that drive people away from your site. Think of elements of your website as voices that must be used properly to be effective. Make sure that the elements draw the attention of your visitor in to your message. If they are not used properly, they will draw the attention out to the visual elements and structure of the site. You don’t have a website in order to show off a design, you have a website to send your message to people you are trying to reach. If your audience sees your design, and not your message (unless your message IS design), your site is a failure.

Colors are voices. People enjoy seeing colors, especially colors that give the feeling of being comfortable with being at your site and match the content. Color can be overused and you end up over-stimulating the eyes of your visitors with something that is not even related to your message. Obnoxious Bright colors can be used effectively, if they are used as accents or for that call to action that you really want to drive your visitors to. As a general rule, try to incorporate no more than two colors in the overall design of your site or you run the danger of losing your message before the visitor even gets to your content.

Headlines are voices. If everything is important, then nothing is important. Your headlines should call attention to important points of your overall message. If there are too many, it tells your audience you don’t really have an idea what your core message is.

Content is a voice. Content is an important part of your message. Content, however, should support your message, not distract from it. Your audience will get more out of your site by presenting content in a reasonable, organized fashion. That usually means that extensive content will go on a different page other than the homepage. Make it easy to navigate to, but make sure the visitor sees it only after they’ve decided they want to commit to that level of research.

Whitespace is a megaphone for your voices. Whitespace is an area without defined content. It doesn’t have to be white to be whitespace. It can be any color or gradient or even non-distracting graphics. It’s just area around the elements of your site that does not have content. Whitespace is necessary to be able to let the voices of your site speak clearly, one at a time, to your audience. Just because there is space on your monitor without text or images, it doesn’t mean you need to fill it with more fluff. That only takes away from the core message you want to send.

Find your core message. Your website should explain that clearly and every element of your website design should not just reflect and support that message, but also clearly convey it to your audience. That is what will make your website a success.