50 Ways to Grow Your Email Marketing List

Pam Neely’s ebook 50 Ways To Grow Your Email Marketing List is a practical compendium of ideas. She divides her 50 tactics among six basic strategies:

• Get more opt-ins at your website.
• Gather subscribers from social media.
• Use search and other people’s websites.
• Take action in the real world.
• Create emails people will want to share.
• Keep your subscribers once you get them.

Each tip has instructions that will be helpful to DIY marketers as well as helping business owners to decide whether a specific tactic will fit with the resources and goals of the company.

We find that this can be an issue for many website owners. You may know that you want and need to do something… but what? If you search online, read books, listen to speakers, and talk with other business owners, you’ll hear about plenty of different tactics that might work. Each option has supporters as well as people who will say they tried it and it didn’t work. Each option, you can be sure, will involve costs — direct costs, time costs, and/or opportunity costs.

Faced with a large menu of possibilities, business owners are likely to feel that any choice among them is pretty random. This book presents a fairly exhaustive list of tactics, with case studies and statistics to back their value, plus estimates of the time and cost involved, often with specific tools to make the process easier.

You can read through the collection and get a good sense of which options will fit your budget and what the value is likely to be for each, without needing a lot of technical background to understand what needs to be done. You will also be better able to identify the team members best suited to carrying out the work, or to gauge what outside entity would best be suited to carrying out the work for you.

All in all, it’s a useful book.

The Website Redesign Process: Using Notable

When you receive the mockup for your web redesign, you might just say, “I love it!” and a week later your website is live. However, you might have some feedback you want to share. We love Notable for this step because it lets everyone put notes directly in the right spot, limiting the number of emails back and forth saying things like,

“I’d like a change in the slideshow.”
“You don’t have a slideshow. Do you mean the banners at the top?”
“No, I mean the photos.”

Notable lets you put a number at the precise spot you’re talking about and then puts a matching number by your comment, as you can see in the screenshot here. It doesn’t matter whether everyone is using the same jargon or not, because the number can be placed exactly where you’d point if you were in the same room.

Everyone can then add comments under the appropriate number, or in a special space below the mockup designed for general comments.

Since the comments stay together under a given number, the various conversations don’t get confused, as can so easily happen with email discussions, and everyone goes to the same place to see and join the discussion so no one gets left out.

Some tips for making Notable work well for mockups:

• Use the button at the top right of the Add Notes page to toggle off the comments so you can see the design without everyone’s notes.

• Be clear — at least with your designer — on which comments should be considered and thought about and which should actually be considered a request for a change. If you have a lot of people giving feedback, as we do, make sure to rein things in (see our post on web design by committee for the reasons).
• Notable supports additional versions of a design. Don’t expect a new version for each change, but do make a new version before too much is going on in people’s imaginations. Discuss with your designer how many iterations (new versions) are covered by your contract.

We like to see everything thrashed out at the mock up stage, with sign off before we start building — and I bet most designers agree.  Many charge extra for changes after sign off. Notable makes this easy. That means that it can not only simplify the process, but also save you money.

Avoiding the Blogging Death Spiral

In Born to Blog: Building Your Blog for Personal and Business Success One Post at a Time , Mark Schaefer and Stanford Smith describe the “blogging death spiral”:

• Recognizing that blogging is good for your website and your company, you begin blogging for your business.
• Without knowing what you’re doing (and the book is certainly an excellent starting point if this describes you), you post mediocre stuff.
• You get little to no results.
• Doing things badly with no clear benefit is discouraging, so you do it less consistently, less frequently, and just as badly.  From a couple of thinly disguised sales-pitches a week you descend to a pointless story about a company party once a month.
• You decide that blogging doesn’t work and scrap the company blog.

We’ve seen this before. Often companies want us to build their website with a blog, because they fully intend to write regularly and harvest all the benefits of having a company blog. Soon it’s gone… or lingering on hopelessly on their website, making them look less on top of things that they should. How can you avoid this death spiral?

The first, obvious answer is to hire a blogger. If you wouldn’t sing your own commercial jingles, then there’s no reason to think you should write your own blog.

But let’s suppose that you really want to write your own company blog. You’re a bootstrapping kind of company (so are we — we get that), your product hasn’t gone national yet, or — and here’s the best reason — you honestly like to write and are willing to put in some time.

How can you avoid the death spiral?

• Decide on a schedule. In our experience, regular posting is important, and twice a week is about the minimum that gets significant results. We moved all our blogging clients to three times a week this year, because that seems to be the sweet spot for results and cost.
• Make sure you have a CMS that your bloggers can actually use with confidence. We recommend WordPress, but if you have something your staff are already accustomed to, you might want to go with that.
• Put one person in charge of editing and making sure the blog gets posted. If no one is specifically accountable, it may not get done.
• Build an editorial calendar. We use Edit Flow, a WordPress plugin, but a white board or a spreadsheet can also work.
• Get in the habit of capturing great blog post ideas. When an event, new product, exciting piece of industry news, or important idea arises, note it on your editorial calendar. This way, there will always be ideas available when people have time to write.

If these steps don’t work for you, hire someone.

The Tags, They are A-Changin’

The new HTML5 <hgroup> tag has been discontinued by the W3C, the web’s governing organization — somewhat behind the scenes.  Admittedly, it was on shaky ground with this whole not-fully-baked HTML5 spec we all now know and love. But the tag kind of made sense and we, like most of the web design community, started using it.

What is the <hgroup> tag? Essentially, if a web page included two or more headline-style lines of text at the top, then the coder would nest them between an opening and closing <hgroup> tag set. Then, the coder could position all of those headlines as one piece, instead of attempting to position them individually. In the past we may have done this with the general <div> tag with some semi-meaningful attribute, but with the focus of HTML5 moving more towards semantic/descriptive tags, the <hgroup> was embraced by a lot of us.

Changing specs makes teaching web design interesting–even more interesting than the usual technology and syntax changes that come along with teaching in this area. In an online Web Design course I’m teaching now, I recently had a student insist on using the <hgroup> tag since my screencasts, text materials and lynda.com video tutorial examples still included it as a valid tag. After I provided a few links for proof, he finally acquiesced and dropped his campaign.

It’s not just teaching that gets a bit fuzzy with this rapidly moving publishing technology of website design. What about site validation for all the WordPress and other sites we’ve already published and handed over to clients? Site validation is what we do to make sure we’re providing good, solid code that the web browsers will like and display correctly. The discontinuance of the tag won’t affect how these sites appear and function going forward, and no typical user will really notice such an arcane little change in the specification or rendering of the web page, but the holistic coding practice we like to embrace is affected a bit. The site will no longer officially validate with the W3C if the validator service sees an <hgroup> tag right now. Again, most people won’t notice — but some of our clients will worry that the code won’t validate, and will have trouble understanding our explanations.

The <hgroup> tag could come back in a further revision of HTML5, but who knows? Either way, we won’t be adding it on new sites, and any of our sites that we manage, we’ll probably go back in and remove them if we see any trouble on the horizon. But we don’t see any trouble that necessitates changes on any published sites, and that’s good.

Do You Need SEO if You Have No Competitors?

I’m writing a website for a county: pages for the assessor, the parks department, and all that. we normally check out an organization’s competitors when writing their website, and of course a county doesn’t really have competitors.  There aren’t competing coroner’s offices jousting with you for the keyword “county coroner’s office.” There’s no competing tax collector down the street.

It isn’t only government offices that struggle with this question. Perhaps you think your goods and services are so special that you have no competitors. Maybe you’re a nonprofit, so you don’t think of yourself as having competition. Maybe you’re not selling anything at your website, but just providing information as a service.

So do you still need to think about SEO?

Remember that SEO is a matter of communicating well with search engines. Would you want to be able to communicate well with the search engines regardless of competition? Most of us would. Here’s why a government website should still care about SEO:

• You want to serve your constituents well. It’s hard enough to get people to pay taxes cheerfully without making it hard to find the information they need to do so. The same is true for any organization. SEO is about usability, not just marketing.
• You want to make sure people are aware of the benefits you offer. If your Parks and Recreation department has wonderful things to offer but citizens don’t know that, use will be lower than it could and your funding can be affected. The same is true for nonprofits, and of course for specialized products and services.
• You actually do have competitors, whether you know it or not. Nobody’s competing with a county to offer jails or car tags, but they may have private competitors for parking, pavilion rentals, jobs, human services, and many other items. A radical new product is in competition with whatever people used before this product came along. A nonprofit is in competition for volunteers, donors, and grant money. If your constituents look for solutions to the problems you can solve, do they find you — or someone else?

You always need to think about SEO when you write content for a website, unless you’re just talking to yourself.

The Website Redesign Process: The Mockup

Delivery of the mock up is one of the most exciting moments of a redesign. Designer Tom Hapgood’s mock up of the new Haden Interactive web design certainly created a stir for us, even though we’ve been through a lot of these experiences with clients.

A mock up is a picture of what the website will look like after it has been built. For Haden Interactive, a mock up is always the result of a lot of research, discussion, and thought.

Ours, shown here, is a stacked design which will provide multiple screens for visitors who scroll. The “What we do and how to get it” section is above the fold, followed by “Who we are and where you can read/hear/find us,” and then a pull-in from RebelMouse instead of the more typical Twitter or Facebook feed. All the way through, there are interactive opportunities. We all love it.

But we know that the delivery of the mock up, while exciting, can also be confusing for many clients. They try to push navigation buttons and they don’t work, they worry about what the interior pages will look like, and sometimes they want to wait and see what everything looks like on the real website before they make changes.

This is a mistake. Many web firms charge extra for any changes after sign off on the mock up, and all web firms will do so if the time investment goes far beyond the original agreement. Making changes to the mock up is much easier than making changes to the website after it has been built — think of making changes to the house plan compared with making changes to the house.

Let everyone have a last conversation about the design at this point. Make decisions about navigation. Don’t get caught up in punctuation or little issues with content, because that isn’t settled, but your goal should be to avoid any design changes after this point.

You can see in the detail at right that some of the text is still lorem ipsum, the quasi-Latin designers use to replicate the effect of real text. We’ve had folks object, “I don’t understand why my home page is in Italian!” when they see this, but don’t be alarmed. A lot of things about the content can be undecided at this point.

We often send website content in a Word document, putting the home page text into the mockup and waiting for approval on the rest before implementing it all into the website. It’s easy to change words later — especially in a WordPress site.

Make sure you love the design, though, before the website is built. The mock up is your opportunity to make sure all is well first.

Website Redesign Process: Gathering Assets

If you’re starting a brand new company with a brand new website, you may have nothing to give your web team but your branding and brainstorming. For a website redesign process, though, you probably have a lot of stuff that they need.

Chances are you have images you want to use, guidelines for your company’s visual identity, photos, infographics, information, videos, links, and documents that you want included on your website somehow.

Getting it to them can be complex. Try the simple quiz below to see how ready you are to turn over your assets to your team:

• You have your logo..
  • in a vector file
  • as a JPG
  • in a PDF
  • on a business card
• Your photos…
  • are collected on a CD-ROM or USB drive
  • are somewhere on your computer, or maybe in your phone
  • are in a shoebox
  • …what photos?
• Your videos…
  • are uploaded at YouTube or Vimeo, and you’ve provided the links.
  • are in MP4 format in a dropbox.
  • are in Flash, and you want some changes when they’re uploaded.
  • are commercials on TV. How do we put those on the internet?
• Your company and product information…
  • is organized in a Word document.
  • is contained in a bunch of brochures, ads, and handwritten notes you’ve gathered.
  • can be found easily around on the web if the team will just Google it.
  • is still pretty fluid, but we’ll be able to add and change things as we go along, right?
• If you have patient forms, newsletters, or other documents you want included in the website…
  • you have them as HTML files, or have the budget to create them.
  • you have them as web-optimized PDf files.
  • you have them on pieces of paper in an envelope.
  • you’re going to find them pretty soon and get them updated or something.
• Your staff information for the About Us page…
  • is in that Word document mentioned above.
  • is up to date on the current website.
  • is readily available on LinkedIn.
  • isn’t ready yet, but we announced at the staff meeting that everyone should send you something.
• Your company’s social media information…
  • is also in that Word document.
  • is up to date on the current website, and we’re sending the log-in info in an email.
  • is known only by the people who set it up, and they no longer work here.
  • …we don’t have any social media. Do we?
• When you’re asked for access to your website…
  • you provide the URL for logging in as well as the password and username for your C panel, plus the FTP information.
  • you provide the login information for your WordPress website.
  • you think you might know the name of the hosting company, and you’ll ask your IT guy.
  • you’re not sure what the question means.

How’d you do? The closer your answers are to the top of the list, the easier it’s going to be.

The best plan is to have all the things you need gathered up to give to your web team before they begin work. This will help avoid delays and ensure that everything you want in your website actually gets into your website.

Website Update — Go Long!

Long web pages are popular among web designers now (read about the “above the fold” issues) and the stacked style is downright trendy.

Rocky Grove Sun Company is a local renewable energy engineering firm. We built a website for them a couple of years ago. You can see the screenshot of that build below. Like any company that has not updated their website in a couple of years, Rocky Grove was ready for a refresh.

They also wanted to add an interactive map showing some of their installations. Designer Tom Hapgood built the map in Google Earth and added it to the homepage to give a new, stacked look to the page.

He also reconfigured the page to bring in the newest blog posts, another thing the guys at Rocky Grove wanted to do, and created a long home page.

If you compare the original (right) with the new version (above), you can see that this is an economical update rather than a redesign, but it gives a fresh look to the site and includes all the elements the company wanted:

• content updates
• new photos in the slider
• an interactive map of installations
• blog posts pulled onto the homepage
• an additional photo at the bottom of the page

Want to see more about that map? Tom built it with Google Maps as described in our post on creating an interactive map for your website.

He put a little sun at the location of each of the jobs the guys at Rocky Grove listed for us, and added a pop-up box with a photo of the job. Click on a sun icon and the photo pops up.

This lets the guys share a lot of their work in a small space, as well as showing their service area in a fun way.

Because Tom was able to work the new map into a reconfigured stacked design, Rocky Grove’s new look is more exciting, more interactive, and more vibrant without losing any of the original design. This worked because the site already works well for the company. “We love it,” the guys told me. “We’re really proud of it.”

If you still feel that way about your website, an update can keep it fresh and up to date on a comfortable budget.

The Website Redesign Process: Content

Designer Tom Hapgood and I met yesterday to map out the site architecture for our new company website.

We’re just getting started on the process of redesigning our website — and I realized yesterday that we’re through with the parts the clients share. “Do you know,” I said to Julianne, “that at this point, the clients are out of the process for a while and we’re doing everything?”

She did know this, because Julianne is not involved in any of the creative work on websites, so she is pretty much out of the process now for our internal web design.

This isn’t a problem for companies working with Haden Interactive, because we take care of your content. Most web firms don’t, though. They give you a design with lorem ipsum in it, or with empty boxes you are supposed to fill with content. On a website redesign, they’ll typically just use what you already have, sometimes simply duplicating it if they’ve designed new pages. This is not good.

So how do you approach the content issue for a website redesign?

Check your analytics

This should be the first thing you think about. Here are some things you can learn from your analytics:

• Which pages are currently doing well in search?
• Which pages are most popular?
• Which pages convert well?
• Which pages have high bounce rates?
• Which pages are working hard in your sales funnel?
• Which pages aren’t being visited?
• What pages do people search for on your site — and not find?
• What keywords bring the most traffic?
• What keywords lead to conversion?
• What keywords should be bringing traffic but are not?
• Are visitors following the path-to-purchase you planned?
• Are people getting confused?
• Is social media bringing traffic?
• Is your social media integration working?

Once you’ve delved into all this, you should have a clear idea of what works and what needs work when it comes to your content. You’ll have a list of pages that need to be rewritten, pages that need to be added, and pages you’ll want to keep as they are.

Think about branding.

On the list of branding essentials you’ll find “tone of voice.” This is about content. We’ve seen websites where the homepage content was copied from a brochure and the tone of voice is very corporate — but when you click to an inner page you find something completely different. We’ve seen About Us pages where the various staff members have written their own bios in third person, so the content on that one page ranges from stiffly formal to witty and whimsical.

You need a website that sounds the same throughout. Bright and brash, reserved yet sharp, or warm and friendly, the tone should be the same on every page unless you have a special reason (maybe a letter from the president) for including some variation.

It’s very likely that your content doesn’t really convey your brand the way you want it to, but you may not be able to see that — it’s hard to judge your own website objectively. Get some outside opinions and consider hiring a professional — you may be surprised to learn how affordable web content copywriting can be (call 479.966.9761 to hire Haden Interactive for this part of your redesign).

Get it right.

Most designers don’t read the copy they place in your website, let alone proofread it. You can’t rely on a web designer to catch typos or to decide which elements should be headings.

If you have a content management system like WordPress, you may be able to get in to change or correct your text, but sometimes the home page is not accessible — in fact, a custom website may have quite a bit of the content coded in or in a place where it’s hard to find. You may also find, even with a CMS, that it’s not worth your time to make your own content changes. Often they won’t look just the way you want them to, and if you don’t spend much time in your CMS, it can be hard to remember just how to manage it. Changes that take your web pros a couple of minutes can take you an hour.

That means that if you’re responsible for your own content, you must be sure you get all the spelling and punctuation right before you send it to your designer. Then you must be sure to proofread it one last time after it has been implemented into the design.

For Haden Interactive, we’re planning big content changes. We’re rewriting most of our pages, reorganizing the site architecture, and adding lots of new things. Pretty exciting. Your redesign might not involve so many content changes, but it makes sense to take the opportunity to examine your website thoroughly and find the points where optimization and updating could make a difference for you.

(Harmless) Stalking for Fun and Profit

Knowing more about your customers can mean knowing the kind of content they’ll enjoy and find useful, the places you should be to connect with them online, and the kinds of offers they’ll find appealing. When you really know your clients, you’re less likely to fall prey to overgeneralizations (“Nobody watches TV any more”) or emotional decisions (“I know what I like”).

Here’s a quick and easy way to learn more about your customers. All you’ll need is a couple of hours and a team member with mad internet research skillz.

Begin with your customer personas. This is the imaginary person based on your target market: your typical customer or best customer. You know your customer’s gender, age, family circumstances, average income, and buying motivations. So find a person like that online. Check LinkedIn for people in your target area with the kind of job your customer persona has.

You could use an actual customer, of course, but choosing a stranger will keep you from feeling inhibited when you move on to the next step: stalking.

Google is your best friend here, but there are other places to look:

• Intelius gives you lots of basic info that you can use to find more data.
• http://pinterest.com/USER-NAME/following/ is the search to find who your target customer follows on Pinterest — providing great insights into what he or she finds visually appealing. Just past that in your navigation bar, replacing USER-NAME with the Pinterest handle of your subject.
• MyLife shares more information about the subject’s family.
• 123People can hook you up with your subject’s online life, including articles
• Know’em is a quick first check for social media profiles. However, your subject may choose something less obvious for a username, so it’s just a quick check.

Look at the ways they use social media so you can reach them where they are. See the kind of content they like to consume — only a very small percentage of people actually produce content online, so this is usually more accessible than what they themselves post. Use the information you find to flesh out your fictional persona.

Then use the LinkedIn “similar” button to find another subject. Study a few for each of your personas.

Make this easy on yourself — choose people with unusual names. Trying to stalk Josh Green or Kate Johnson will give you a very low signal-to-noise ratio. You’ll also find at LinkedIn that you can’t see much about people with whom you have no connection. Depending how uncomfortable it makes you to stalk acquaintances, you may be able to find more information about people with whom you are connected in the second degree. Who knows — you might make friends and influence people as a side effect of your research.

We’ve found specialized social sites we’d never heard of, IRL networking opportunities we hadn’t considered, and counterexamples to our expectations — all of which are very valuable.

The Website Redesign Process: Branding

Your website, since it is in many cases the first place people see you, is a central part of your brand. Your website needs to convey your brand accurately and well. In fact, one of the common reasons companies choose to have a website redesign is that their company has evolved past their current website, or that they’re planning to rebrand.

You need to communicate your brand clearly enough to your web pros that your redesigned website looks like your company or your brand.

Part of that is letting them get to know you and your brand well enough to fully understand you. When I write a website, I want to tell the owner’s story — to show how they’re great. I’m currently writing web content for a renewable energy company and a county; in each case, their are myriad ways to approach the story, so I have to understand the brand thoroughly enough to tell their story, not a story about a generic county or a generic company.

The designer, too, should grasp how your company wants to look. Especially if you’re having a custom website built, there’s no reason for the site to say, “A Medical Practice” when it could say, “Dr. Chaney’s family dental practice.”

There are two obstacles to your getting a well-branded website: you don’t know what communicates your brand and you don’t convey it clearly.

I mentioned a list from Deloitte yesterday (the book is Designing B2B Brands: Lessons from Deloitte and 195,000 Brand Managers, if you’d like to see the whole thing):

• Name: what’s the name of your company? Do you use different names on different occasions? Do you use an acronym some of the time? Are there regional variations?
• Tagline: do you have a tagline, a phrase that follows the name of your company? This may be a promise to your consumers or a marketing catch phrase or an explanation of what you do.
• Tone of voice: are you serious, playful, cocky, modest, traditional? Do you have one tone of voice for your website’s main content and a different tone for your blog?
• Logo: this can be a graphic logo or a wordmark, and you might have a variation or two, such as a vertical and a horizontal look or one for dark and one for light backgrounds.
• Color: the color(s) of your logo are a common starting point for web design, and your company may have an official company color pallet. Does your industry have colors associated with it in the minds of your consumers? Are there color-related cultural issues for your target population? Are there colors you want to avoid?
• Typography: while your logo, your tagline, and your chosen tone of voice may all affect your decisions here, you should share any strong feelings on the subject with your designer.
• Imagery: do you want to use stock images or will you supply photos of your building, products, and staff? Do you have a particular style of image in mind, or company style guides that affect the decision?
• Composition: where should pictures and text go, how much white space do you want, and what kinds of margins and borders do you prefer? While this is probably best left to your designer, if you have preferences on these issues, it’s best to share them at the beginning.
• Iconography: websites use lots of icons, small pictures showing where to click to go to your social media profiles or to download the blog feed, etc. Do you want particular colors, styles, or shapes?
• Information graphics: will you want to use infographics in special ways at your website, perhaps in banners or to explain processes?
• Sound: if you will be using videos or podcasts, having a consistent sound is important. That might include the “stinger” — the brief passage of music or other sound you’ll use in the introduction  — as well as the voices.

If you can sit down with that list and describe each one for your brand, you have a great starting point. To clarify this, let’s try it for Coca-Cola, a brand with which we’re probably all familar:

• Name: Coca-Cola is also Coke
• Tagline: Coke has used several taglines in the past, from “the pause that refreshes” to “it’s the real thing.” At the moment, it seems to be, “live positively.”
• Tone of voice: Coke is fun and happy.
• Logo: The Coca-Cola logo is one of the most recognizable logos in the world.They also use the distinctive bottle shape and a special “mycoke” logo.
• Color: Coca-Cola red is a basic for all Coke visuals.

We could go on, but it’s probably clear by now.

Gather this information and get it to your web professionals. If that means you have to make some decisions — do it.

The Website Redesign Process: Colors

The big picture in the website redesign includes basic layout decisions and it also includes branding.

Deloitte recently did a book on branding that listed the following elements:

• Name
• Tagline
• Tone of voice
• Logo
• Color
• Typography
• Imagery
• Composition
• Iconography
• Information graphics
• Sound

This is a good list to think about us you plan a website redesign. Today, let’s think about just one of these things: color.

There’s plenty of information about color psychology around. Interestingly enough, most of it doesn’t fess up to the fact that there is very little actual data supporting the claims commonly made. That is, there is little to no evidence that red is exciting or that blue makes people feel calm.

There is a lot of evidence that we associate colors with things, however, and that we use that information in decision making. Some colors are strongly associated in consumers’ minds with certain fields or products, for example. This information should certainly inform your choices when it comes to color in your company website.

A power tool company that decides to go with pink and silver for their website is an unusual power tool company. What’s more, they may find that visitor’s bounce away quickly, since that one big question web visitors have — “Am I in the right place?” — has been answered for many in their first glimpse of pink.

Beyond the associations of colors, color is one of the most subjective decisions in a website redesign. Search engines do not use color as a factor in deciding what website to offer to searchers, and while usability is certainly affected by color, it’s more about levels of contrast than about specific hues.

For our company website, the initial color decision was left entirely up to the designer. At the time, most websites for web professionals were black and/or blue, and I just said I didn’t want those colors. I was doing something different from the average web design company and I wanted to look completely different. The designer created a warm, red-brown and gold website.

When it was time for a redesign, I had those colors used to create a logo — the usual starting point for web design –  and we asked the designer to go lighter. For our current redesign, we had a brief group chat about color and then instructed Tom Hapgood, our designer, to do whatever he wanted.

As you can see, we represent one side of the continuum. My feeling is that it doesn’t make sense to hire an artist and then get in his way with restrictions. The other side of the continuum is the client who specifies a palette of colors and asks the designer to work within those colors. This can be for good reasons, such as corporate requirements for colors, or for whimsical reasons like, “I don’t know anything about web design, so this is my input.”

It can also be that you love color and care a lot about it, and want your artistic sensibilities to inform the design even if you’re not the one building it. Or that you are using a theme or template and choosing the color is your part in building it.

The first edition of The Web Designer’s Idea Book has separate sections discussing and illustrating the use of various colors in websites. You might also enjoy these blog posts:

• Blue websites
• Tangerine Websites
• Pink Websites
• Light on Dark Websites
• Yellow and Black
• Color and Your CMS
• Color at Your Website
• Psychology of Color in Web Design (Vandelay Design)

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