It seems there is an endless supply of color scheme tools available both on the web and as installable applications. Recently, however, we came across what is now our favorite color scheme generator in Color Scheme Designer 3.  It’s great for design inspiration or just to toy with for hours on end.

Top Features

• Beautiful and simple web-based interface
• Offers mono, complementary, triad, tetrad, analogic, and accented analogic color schemes
• Simple color wheel for easy base color selection
• Allows for adjustments to the selected color scheme (i.e. max contrast, light pastel, and 20+ more adjustments)
• Lists all resulting hex color codes from the full color scheme
• Preview on a light and dark sample web page
• Export the color scheme to HTML+CSS, Photoshop palette, and others
• Completely free to use (donations accepted)!

If you are looking for a quality color scheme generator, definitely check out Color Scheme Designer 3.  What other generators have you used in the past and found good success in using?

Last week we discussed avoiding Flash websites, but felt it could be worthwhile to discuss when Flash can work within a website design.  It is important to emphasize that Flash and visual effects must never take priority over usability of a website.  So, when can Flash work?

• Using Non-Standard Fonts – Due to how browsers function and the variety of different computers and devices that are used to access the web, there is a quite limited set of standard fonts that are considered “universally acceptable” to be used in web design.  Thanks to Flash and the creation of sIFR, web designers have the ability to use any font they like in their designs.  Without the Flash plug-in there is a simple fallback to a standard system font.  No loss of usability.
• Multimedia (Music, Videos, Photo Albums) – Many sites like YouTube and Facebook are very multimedia intensive.  Watching a video of a cat on a piano or listening to a favorite local band has become a staple on the Internet.  Currently, Flash has earned its place as the best method for sharing media on the web. As a fallback method, well…there is none.  You either get it or your don’t.  It’s certainly not a first choice.
• Visual “Flair” – Occassionally, Flash can serve the purpose of providing some small visual effect that will enhance a design’s quality or experience.  As previously stated, the effect should be non-essential and have a quality fallback method.

There are surely other places where Flash can be effective, but ultimately the decision should come down to whether or not it furthers a website’s effectiveness with its visitors.

From time to time Blue Ember Design gets requests to have sites built in Flash.  Here are 7 good reasons why that might be a bad idea:

1. Bandwidth Intensive – Files associated with Flash websites are typically very large files.  The more intricate the animations, the larger the file.  What if your visitor is still using a dial-up Internet connection (7% of Americans still do)?  Some designers use loading pages, but who wants to wait?  That leads us to the next point.
2. Wasting Visitor’s Time – A website has seconds to capture a visitor’s attention.  Every second spent loading is a second lost.  If a visitor wants to buy something from an online store, do they want to wait through an intro video first?
3. CPU Intensive – On top of being bandwidth intensive, Flash can be CPU intensive.  Flash websites run on the visitor’s computer and use its graphics card for animation.  Not all computers are fast enough to handle Flash websites.
4. Limited Usability – Functionality of a website built in Flash is often not as expected (or desired).  Examples:
   • The “Back” button doesn’t work as expected because the entire site is one multimedia video.  The only way to go back is to use the navigation (hopefully) built into the Flash file.
   • Most modern browsers have the ability to make the text on a page larger or smaller.  Flash can’t react to this browser functionality; making it difficult for those with vision impairment to use the website.
   • Searching for text within a page is impossible.  Any text on the page is a part of the video and therefore inaccessible to the browser’s search feature.
5. Requires a Browser Plug-In – Flash requires a browser plug-in to be displayed.  Most browsers support a Flash plug-in provided by Adobe, but good web etiquette says there should be a fallback if the visitor does not.  What is the fallback?  A traditional website that uses HTML to display pages.  The alternative is to tell the visitor they need to download the plug-in.  Remember when we talked about wasting visitor’s time above?
6. Limited Search Engine Visibility – Google has made advancements in the ability to index the content of Flash files, but it’s far from perfect.  The goal of any website that hopes to have good Google rankings should be to make it’s important content easily and readily available to search engine spiders.  Flash doesn’t come even close to offering this.
7. Development Costs – The number of highly skilled Flash developers is significantly lower than the number of traditional web designers.  This fact gives them the green light to charge higher prices.  Be prepared to pay a higher rate for the creation of the website as well as any following updates or additions.

Why do you need a company blog? Isn’t blogging just for professional writers or angst-filled teenagers?  Hardly.  Here are four quality reasons that your company should have a blog.

1. Search Engine Ranking – Search engines love blogs.  Why?
   1. Sitemaps – A sitemap is a file which helps search engines locate URLs available for crawling.  Most popular blogging software have a feature that does this automatically.
   2. Pings – In terms of blogging, a ping is an automatic online notification that new content has been posted to a blog.  This ping is often sent to web services like Technorati, Google, and others to notify them that the blog is updated and should be indexed.
   3. Categories/Tags – Blog posts are often associated with categories and tags in order to group similar topics together.  Effective categorizing and tagging will many times result in both better search engine rankings as well as more pageviews per visitor because of it’s similar content.
   4. Fresh Content – Search engines love fresh content.  An active website with regularly updated information will be indexed more frequently and likely be considered as more relevant in the longer term.
2. Customer Confidence – Visitors need a reason to trust your company as well as your services/products.  A blog can be used to convey knowledge, expertise, and professionalism.  The better a potential customer trusts a company, the more confident they will be in making a purchase.
3. Social Networking – Sites like MySpace and Facebook are typically considered to define “Social Networking”.  While that is true in many ways, social networking is much more broad.  Through a blog, a company can post information about their business, their product, or their industry and open it for conversation through comments.  This back-and-forth on a common topic is great for generating new product ideas, improving existing services, providing support, and more.
4. Cost Effectiveness – To be able to create new, fresh content without a blogging or CMS platform can become costly.  To produce content like a blog, tens or hundreds of individual pages would need to be created individually by a web designer.  By using a blog, a company can save money in the longer term.

Let Blue Ember Design educate you on the details of blogging and get you started with your own custom blog design.

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Every designer will have their preferred method for selecting a color scheme for a project.  Many times their strategy will depend on the project and existing logos/collateral.  Here are three solid methods for picking a great color scheme from scratch.

1. Color Wheel – This method involves using a color wheel and a fairly mathematical method for selecting colors.  There are a handful of rules for selecting colors (analogous, monochromatic, complementary, etc.) that can generate very successful color schemes.  The best rule choice will largely depend on the desired feel of the final product.  There are some great tools for building color schemes online, such as Color Scheme Designer 3.
2. Color Matching – This method is far less scientific and much more artistic.  To do color matching, the designer finds a picture that they are fond of and feels could work as a cohesive color palette.  Nature does a great job of providing stunning scenes (sunsets, flowers, etc.) that translate perfectly to a color scheme.
3. Artistic Sense – This method is entirely artistic and involves the designer starting with a white canvas and building on it from scratch.  The technique can be difficult because it is very “right brain” and involves imagination as well as knowledge of color relationships.

No matter what method it takes to get there, a great color scheme is the key to a successful design.