With everything becoming more and more visual, color probably sits in the very middle of it. In web design, this means a lot considering how colors can affect users in a lot of ways in terms of engaging with the website. In this article, we are going to understand how color impacts your website’s design as well as knowing which ones to use.

The Psychology of Color

The main foundation for this inquiry is color psychology. We already know that the use of color obviously affects almost everyone. So let us understand why.

In its most basic definition, Color Psychology is the science of how color affects human behavior. So it is not a surprise to know that it is just one of the branches of a broader field of behavioral psychology.

Now let us take this to statistics. In a research made by Satyendra Singh, it is found out that color plays an influence of at least 62-90% in the mere 90 seconds a customer forms an opinion about a product. What this means for web design, most especially for those who sell products and services, is that color greatly affects conversion rates. Therefore, color is critical!

You don’t think that Facebook is color blue just because Mark Zuckerberg likes it. Amazon is orange not because one of its founders like the fruit. And lastly, Google is not simply white because it just feels like it.

What we are trying to say is that behind every successful websites’ web design considered color as one of its important choices. So let us delve deeper into that and identify some color psychology that may be helpful to you.

Where to Use Colors

Before anything else, let us first identify the parts of your pages where the use of color is very important. This is to give you a good visual of how to put it all together once you know this.

• Pop-ups
• Borders
• Headlines
• Background hues
• Primary web banners or hero graphics
• Buttons, especially call for action

What Colors to Use

Now, let us identify what colors to use on your website to make it more appealing according to the purpose you want to be achieved.

Blue

Blue is a good color to foster user’s trust. This explains why Facebook, even how toxic it may seem sometimes, has garnered a lot of users. It is the color most associated with peace, order, loyalty, calm, and trust.

Orange

Orange creates a sense of urgency, which could also be impulsive. It stimulates physical activity, competition, and confidence. So you can understand why Amazon often leads you to shop more than you should.

Black

Some descriptions attached to the color black is luxury and value. It even reaches the point where the darker the tone, the more luxurious it feels. Black exhibits elegance, sophistication, and power. You can notice this on a number of high-end websites and products, usually cars and jewelry.

White

White can be associated with freedom, spaciousness, and breathability. The use of white space has become a go-to for much of modern contemporary designs due to its psychological association with liberation. So it is also a good color to compliment other bright ones as it can make everything seem orderly and not crowded and overwhelming.

One of the things that small businesses are starting to love to do to improve their SEO is adding anchor links. With SEO becoming more competitive, you need to employ as many techniques as possible that will raise your rankings up. If you are still new to this, however, and want to learn more, then we got you. We have written down below the basic things you need to learn about anchor links:

What are Anchor Links?

First things first. Let us define what anchor links are.

Anchor links, also known as anchor tags, are basically a tag that you can attach to a word or a phrase. However, this differs from those hyperlinks wherein instead of taking your users to another webpage, it will take them to a different section of the page. In much simpler terms, it is a link on a page that brings you to a specific place on that page. Essentially, you are creating a unique URL within the same page. So how do you do it?

How to Use Anchor Links

The answer to that last question is not actually as complicated as you think. What you just need to keep in mind is your basic HTML. Here are the steps you can follow:

• Begin by writing out your copy and putting it on your website. This could either be as a new page or on an existing page.
• Next, open your text editor and determine where you want to insert the name anchor tag or link and where you want it to go (anchor destination).  This is doable anywhere such as the heading, word, phrase, etc.
• Then, insert the anchor tag around the text you’re going to link. You will need to add an HTML code using <a> tag to create the link and to create the destination. Both will look like this:
• The anchor link will use this format:
• <a href=”#anchor1″ >Anchor Link Text</a>
• The anchor destination will use this format:
• <a name=”anchor1″>Anchor Destination Text</a>

And that is it!

As a reminder, just make sure that the “a href” and “a name” are identical except for a “#” symbol with “a href”

Also, make sure to never overcrowd your website with too much anchor links. Use them sparingly. Having too much will become an annoyance to your visitors who would be jumping too much all over the page. So be cautious.

Why Use Anchor Links

Now the question remains: why do we need to use them? Well, we got the answers here for you. Here are some of its benefits:

• No Scrolling is Needed. Your visitors would find this very convenient as they don’t have to go through multiple chunks of text.
• It Makes Content More Organized. Anchor tags keep things in order. You won’t have to create several web pages or even split a document. You can contain them in one place.
• Helpful to Search Engine. When Google shows your webpage in the results, it sometimes uses anchor tags to send the user to a particular section where the answer to the query is.

One technique that has been gaining some momentum in web design is Parallax Scrolling. But of course, not everyone is familiar with it. So here is a breakdown of the necessary things you need to know about it.

What is Parallax Scrolling?

Parallax scrolling is a web design visual effect that makes the background of the page to move along when scrolling down. It enables the background to move at a slower rate than the foreground, creating a 3D effect.

The term was coined from the stunts developed in the 2D gaming where they use various background images to establish an illusion as the game progresses. This same concept for web design opens up a number of opportunities for several activities because users will most likely stay to scroll through the pages.

Another thing it does is it allows you to click on the navigation link, which will then jump you down to that specific section you desired. So instead of clicking around and going through the entire website just to find some information, parallax makes the content design contain everything all on one page.

How Does Parallax Scrolling Affect Your Website?

Parallax scrolling, just like most things, is created for its benefits. However, it can’t help but have some disadvantages also. Here are some of them:

Benefits of Parallax Scrolling

• Convenient – probably one of the main things anyone who has ever visited a website with parallax scrolling is its convenience. This technique is very easy to execute and makes viewing the website navigable. Accessing articles is then not complicated with the different links around.
• Visual Effects – of course, the best thing about parallax scrolling is its visual effect. It just makes a webpage much more appealing to the eyes. Through it, the business story of the website can become very engaging.

Disadvantages of Parallax Scrolling

• Slow Loading Page – Since parallax scrolling requires a lot of technical stuff and computation for the script, the loading time of the page may become slow. Those with a slow Internet connection and even those using their mobile devices will especially feel this. And when the website takes a long time to show up, you know that it’s not going to be great with the user experience.
• Not Good to SEO – With parallax websites, you will actually have to visit one or two pages utmost since it aims to compress everything. However, this does not look good with SEO. Search engines usually prefer websites that offer numerous, content-rich pages. And unfortunately, Parallax does not provide that.
• Incompatible with Browsers – Different kinds of browsers have their own way of making websites. Due to the way Parallax website works, where it compresses everything, they may find it tricky to have various kinds of browsers adapt. What works for Google may not for Mozilla. So you have to go through a number of testing.
• Tricky for Analytics – Finally, parallax may prove difficult in terms of analytics. Since all content is lumped into one page, identifying which one is capturing more visitors could be hard.

When creating a website, one of the first things you need are pictures. In this world where the visual aspects are being given greater depth, it helps to find the best ones that will serve your website well. This adds to the fact that pictures can greatly improve your business website in a lot of ways, not just for beautification.

If you are still establishing your website and are at the position where you still can’t afford to hire photographers to take images just for you, then you can always count on the Internet and its world of stock photos without having to worry about copyright. However, not all stock photo websites are made equal. Some offer low quality while some the best. So to help you with this, we have compiled a list of the best websites to find stock photos:

Unsplash

This is probably one of the best websites to find royalty-free stock photos out there. Almost everyone knows about Unsplash and for the good reasons.

It offers beautiful high-resolution and professionally taken stock photography for everyone. No matter the type or the theme, you can surely find it. The possibilities are almost endless with over 300,000 stock photos in total and counting. They add thousands more every day. And as we have mentioned, all of these are for free.

500px.com

Another great website to look for that perfect stock photo to use on your website, 500px offers both free and paid images. There are a number of unique images here that you can’t simply find on any other websites. It even has a larger collection than Unsplash with quality that is just as good.

You can enjoy both free and paid membership if you are willing, to explore more choices. These are also professionally taken. The photos are raved about for being more artistic and realistic.

Burst by Shopify

Burst by Shopify offers beautiful stock photography that you can use for various industries. At the very core of it is photography with e-commerce in mind. So if your website is more inclined to business, then this is a great place to look for stock photos.

You will also find the website very easy to navigate and search due to its wide variety of collections. Plus, the photos here are free for commercial use.

Life of Pix

Just like the movie title that sounds like it, Life of Pix gives true to life, high-resolution stock photography. With its thousands of stock photos available, you can surely find something for your industry, be it from food and people, to architecture and textures. In terms of copyright, the images are free for commercial use. However, there are some minimal restrictions applied to distributors.

Pexels

Pexels have a great number of stock photos that you can use for either personal or commercial use. Their growing number of over 40,000 is added with 3,000 new stock photos every month. You can find a ton of artistic stock images no matter the theme or feel you are aiming for your website.

This digital age has made advancements and changes even more constant and fast. What this means in the world of SEO is that strategies and techniques may not work as much as it used to.

With the coming of the New Year comes a whole range of predictions about SEO. These things may come true or not. Either way, if you don’t want to find yourself losing and missing out, then it helps to prepare by first getting yourself familiar with these predictions.

So without further ado, here are the top SEO predictions for 2018:

There will be a Huge Improvement in Video and Image Search

As the world becomes more visual, an expected twist to SEO is an improvement in how people use video and image search. The advancements in technology, most especially in the increase of Internet speed, have led searchers to engage and interact more with videos and images.

Therefore, it won’t be long before Google makes some changes in their algorithms to improve the involvement of images and videos in online searches.

More Companies will Employ Video as an SEO Technique

As you may have known, one of the factors Google considers in their search results ranking is the dwell time. And now, one of the most effective ways websites get their visitors to stay longer on their site is by placing videos.

Videos have increasingly become one of the preferred ways people consume content. So it is not hard to imagine the impact of using videos for a longer interaction time from an SEO standpoint.

Voice Search will Increase

The rise of smartphones with AI personal assistants like Siri as well as smart speakers will greatly impact the increase of voice searches. Through these devices, people will now rely on spoken queries online.

Even in 2008 to 2016, a study has found out that the use of voice search queries has increased by 35 times. Take that to the times now where word accuracy is rapidly improving, we can just expect a more sophisticated use of voice search; leading to more and more people using this function.

That is why in the coming months, we can just expect increasing use of voice search. As a marketer, it is now necessary to change and optimize your SEO strategy for voice.

Other Search Engines Beyond Google and Bing will Flourish

For years, Google and Bing have been the main search engines SEOs focus. However, we can expect to see a shift from this. There will be an increase in trend of companies competing for ranking space from other search engines.

While Google may still remain to be the top place for people to look for information, other search engines will still play a great part in improving a business or websites’ scope.

If you want to increase your chances and reach more people, then it doesn’t hurt to give other search engines ago; most especially since the amount of Apple users has made Siri a relevant search engine.