When creating a site, choosing the optimum colors is one of the most difficult tasks that arise in spite of the apparent easiness. Choosing the perfect chromatic palette is important in order to effectively communicate the message, in order to strengthen the idea of a unique entity and to create brand awareness.

If you don’t pay close attention to the colors you chose, your site will end up either plain and boring or so chaotic it’s hard to look at. The color you use should only be chosen after careful consideration.

Researchers agree that colors greatly influence the human state of mind. The color scheme that you use on your web site can entice the visitor to engage in the goal of your site (i.e. make a purchase or request your services) or leave it after the first few seconds. Even if they are not aware of it, your visitors will be greatly influenced in their decision to keep browsing your site or to leave it because of the poor selection of colors and other visual displayed elements.

Color Theory

To understand how to pick the best color schemes, it’s first important to understand the three colors theory.

We all know that primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. Then to get secondary colors, you add a primary color to another primary color. Yellow and red give you orange, red and blue give you purple, and blue and yellow give you green. Tertiary colors are, simply a primary color added to one of the adjacent secondary colors. That means there are six tertiary colors (two colors for every primary color). .

Color Meaning

Just as you use words to express yourself, colors can be used as an expression as well and are a language all on their own.

The background color of your website, the color of your header, the color of your text, headlines and sub-headlines etc. can all have a psychological impact on your visitors.

Here is a list of some of the common colors and what type of psychological emotion they invoke in people:

• Red: energy, passion, excitement, power; also implies aggression, danger.
• Blue: coolness, spirituality, freedom, patience, loyalty, peace, trustworthiness; can also imply sadness, depression.
• Yellow: light, optimism, happiness, brightness, joy.
• Green: life, naturalness, restfulness, health, wealth, prosperity; in certain contexts, can imply decay, toxicity.
• Orange: friendliness, warmth, approachability, energy, playfulness, courage.
• Violet: wisdom, sophistication, celebration.
• White: purity, cleanliness, youth, freshness, peace.
• Black: power, elegance, secrecy, mystery.
• Gray: security, maturity, reliability.
• Pink: romance a feminine color.
• Brown: comfort, strength, stability, credibility.

Tips that you should consider for any website

1. Use a natural palette of colors.
They are more pleasing than any of their artificial counterparts. Combine them in order to get the emotional response that you want to get from your visitors. Unnatural colors, such as bright green, blue or red usually cause eye fatigue and chase visitors (i.e. prospects) away. Also you should be aware that primary colors like red, yellow or orange can work well for culinary promotion purposes.

2. Create a strong contrast between a page’s background and its text.
The best combination for readability is black text on white background, but there are also other excellent combinations. Besides white, other effective web site background, colors are dark blue, gray and black. The situation is not the same for product promotions. When the product is the center of attention, desaturated colors are recommended.

3. Select an average of 3 different colors and use them consistently throughout the web site.
Chromatic harmony is one of the most important criteria in order to create a pleasant experience for the visitors. It is strongly recommended that a moderate number of colors should be employed; four or five is ok; more than that not only will create inconsistency, will also cause an eye sore for the visitor making him skip important parts of the site.

Keep in mind that responses to colors vary according to factors such as gender, age or cultural background. You need some serious market research in order to make your site appealing for the exact category you’re targeting.

How colors will impact Sir Lankan businesses

Sri Lanka is a color rich country through out the entire history. We can confirm this by places like Sigiriya, Talada Maligawa and so on. But last few decades this inspiration got stagnated. Reasons are; civil war, social unrest, arm conflict and so on. These reasons practically killed the desire towards the colorful environment, limited the creativity and seized the colorfulness. These were directly reflecting in the websites of the Sri Lankan companies. But there were some amazing creations. Unfortunately the numbers are far less.

Now, the time has dawn again. Since the civil war is coming to a conclusion, people will be re-energized.  New concepts, creatives will flood the market in the near future. Then the knowledge of colors will play a great roll in business success. The knowledge of basic theories of the colors are very essential to build a strong image of your business.

Once the unrest is over, everyone will poke in to internet looking for various things. Government also fueling by declaring this year as a ‘Year of ICT and education’ and implementing numerous projects to uplift the IT and Internet usage. When the internet users get increased the online image of your company will greatly effects the turnover. Simply internet is going to be the next market place for Sri Lankan. So, it’s time for you to get serious about your business image in the internet.

This article was sourced from Creative pro, Designmore, 2 Create a Website, Avengate and Vandelay design

In the age of Google, the best repository for your online identity is your vanity Google search. Many people aspire for themselves — or their offspring — to command prominent placement in the top few links on search engines or social networking sites’ member lookup functions.

Social networking, popularized by teens sharing information with their friends online on Web sites such as Myspace and Facebook, is now blooming in the business world, thanks to new social networks that enable professionals and executives in industries such as advertising and finance to rub virtual elbows with colleagues.

Millions of professionals already turn to broad-based networking sites like LinkedIn to zoominfo to xing, often for recruiting purposes. Business executives also have turned to online forums, email lists and message boards to sound off on information related to their industries.

On LinkedIn, zoominfo and xing people don’t chat about music or what they did on Saturday night, but instead focus on opportunities and how the network can help you. And that’s a winning formula. Here are just some of the most common and productive uses of LinkedIn, zoominfo and xing:

1. Increase freelance work. If you’re a freelancer, or you want to be, getting work in Sri Lanka can always be a challenge. Getting paid on time is the last thing you’ll expect in Sri Lankan market, especially if you’re a freelancer. The only way out is serving other markets. So, set up a profile that shows what you can do, your experience, what you have to offer. Link up with others you know, and you’ve got a free way to market your services. It could take awhile before the jobs start rolling in, but it can’t hurt to start now.
2. Find your dream job. You’ve already got a job, but it’s far from perfect. What you really want to do is create the perfect widget, where only handful of Sri Lankan companies aware of. Well, you’ll never get a job doing that if you just sit on your keister. Put yourself out there on professional social networking sites, search for companies that are looking for perfect widget makers, and contact them.
3. Boost your business. Got a small business but want to generate more customers? Perhaps you’re not connecting with the right people or you need to get in to foreign markets. Professional social networking sites can increase your chances of hitting that big deal that puts your business exactly where you want to be.
4. Improve your Google results. When someone Googles you, do you really want the first thing they see to be your posts on the fly fishing forum? As your professional social networking sites’ profile will have a fairly high Google PageRank, it should rank fairly high in your search results. And you can fill it with stuff you want people to see.
   
5. Check references for potential hires. Trying to hire the perfect widget maker? Well, you’re not likely to find out about an applicant’s sordid past mistakes by calling the references on their application. Do a search for others who worked at the same company at the same time, and get a better background check in minutes.
6. Get advice. Use LinkedIn’s Answers feature to ask a question and get some great answers. As always, you’ll have to sort through the self-promotional fluff, but there are some true experts on LinkedIn, and it’s worth a shot to ask your question.
7. Easy resume. Don’t feel like creating an old-fashioned resume and photocopying, faxing or emailing it to 20 different companies? Create a LinkedIn, zoominfo or xing profile that serves as a resume, and then send people the URL. Be sure to get a vanity URL for this.
8. Do research. Need to find out about business trends for an article, need to find an expert or need to contact people for further information? Professional social networking sites are the decent place to start, especially if you’re running dry on Google.
9. Jazz up your profile. Don’t just go with a plain Jane, boring profile — be sure to put the right information on it to give it the most impact. See Guy Kawasaki’s article on profile makeovers for more.
10. Get connections. When you start out with professional social networking sites, you probably have between 0 and 1 connection. That’s not very productive. Get others you know in your network by granting permission to access your Gmail contacts. See the Slacker Manager’s article for more.
11. Prep for an interview. If you’re going for a job interview, it’s best to know the background of the person you’ll be talking to. Check out their social network profiles to find out more about their work experience, interests, education and more. This will give you an edge.
12. Increase your cred. If you’re trying to market yourself as an expert, for example, or develop credibility in your field, it looks good to have a strong presence in professional social network such as LinkedIn, with lots of connections. It’s even better, if you answer questions with the knowledge of an expert in the Answers section.
13. Brand yourself. This is related to No. 12, but whatever your aim in business, be it as a freelancer, as a potential employee, as a writer, as a business … it’s only smart to develop your own personal brand. What do people think of when they hear your name? A strong presence on LinkedIn only reinforces the branding you’re doing elsewhere. And while you’re at it, be sure to link to your website from your profile.
14. Help others. The best way to network is to help others succeed. They’ll never forget you, and you will be paid back tenfold some day. Use professional social network to help others — promote them, link to them, connect with them, recommend them, answer their questions.
15. Get to know a company. If you want to know about a company, you could Google it or go to their website. But using professional social network sites, you can find out much more about it.
16. Throw out a net when you don’t need it. Sure, a network like this is good when you’re job hunting. What, if you’re not looking for a job? That’s the perfect time to put yourself out there and make connections. Because when you don’t need it, people are more likely to get to know you, because you’re not pushing yourself on them. You’re just forming relationships — and that will pay off when you do need it. And who knows? Maybe the perfect offer will come in when you’re not even looking for it.
17. Get publicity. It can be hard to contact media or top bloggers. But many of them have social network profiles, and you can contact them through the profile. I highly advise you not to spam them — but a press release or a polite email letting them know about a new launch, for example, might be appreciate or at least noticed. It shouldn’t be your whole marketing strategy, but it could help.

Even though Sri Lanka is a very small market, internet is picking momentum, due to various reasons. Internet is becoming a part and parcel of Sri Lankan professionals. So, using Social media wisely will enrich your professionalism and strengthen the marketability. These will open numerous opportunities.

This article was sourced from Marketing Nirvana, The Wall Street Journal and Web Worker Daily

When we talk with most marketers today about how they generate leads and fill the top of their sales funnel, most say trade shows, seminar series, email blasts to purchased lists, internal cold calling, outsourced telemarketing, and advertising.  We call these methods ”outbound marketing” where a marketer pushes his message out far and wide hoping that it resonates with that needle in the haystack.

Technology is making these techniques less effective and more expensive. Caller ID blocks cold calls, TiVo makes T.V. advertising less effective, spam filters block mass emails and tools like RSS are making print and display advertising less effective. It’s still possible to get a message out via these channels, but it costs more.

As we saw eight years ago when the first Internet bubble burst, financial pressure is now forcing companies to make changes. And just like last time, these changes are laying the foundation for a new, more efficient period of Internet growth.

In 2001, when the last downturn began, businesses began shifting some of their marketing budgets to search engine advertising. It was more measurable and targeted than display advertising, so it was appealing to marketers with tight budgets.

As we enter a second Internet downturn, businesses are again seeking efficiency. They’re shifting money out of expensive paid search advertising, and into optimization, content and social media that help them get found in organic search results.

These changes are laying the foundation for a new era of marketing on the web - the Inbound Marketing era.

Inbound marketing

What is inbound marketing? Inbound marketing is when the customers are calling you to make appointments, purchase products, or gain information. The reason that the use of inbound marketing is highly important in this day and age has to do with the do not call registry.

Inbound marketing was coined by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, co-founders of HubSpot, inbound marketing refers to permission-based marketing strategies in which consumers choose to learn more about you by conducting a keyword search online, subscribing to your RSS feed, downloading your white paper, opting into your email newsletter, watching your videos, listening to your podcasts, visiting your social network or commenting on your blog.

Inbound marketing is powered by content. In order to grow smarter and faster than the competition, organizations must continually publish great content online through blogs, podcasts, videos, optimized press releases, case studies, white papers, eBooks and by-lined articles.

Opportunities for Sri Lankan Companies

Still Sri Lanka is not feeling the consequences of the world recession. May be because, the Sri Lankan economy is already suffering for last two decades for various reasons, and the companies here are more molded towards moving on in a challenging and unrealistic environment. Therefore, weather the world recession effect here or not, its time to conquer the foreign markets. Simply because, they’re in recession.

If companies here start to implement inbound marketing strategies now, and continue to add valuable contents specifically related to your niche market, in 6 months time your business starts to blow up. This will not only explore new markets, also strengthen the local market as well. Specially mingling with social medias will increase confident among the Generation y and also x.

The cost effectiveness is the major advantage that adds value to the company’s tight marketing budget. The first mover will definitely get the advantage of becoming a hub of your particular industry, because of rich contents. This hub will generate tones and tones of business from search engines, simply, site visitors becoming leads and then sales.

So, Welcome to the age of inbound marketing. The time is now to get started.

This article was sourced from Hub Spot, sapphire’s dawn, business knowledge source and  PR 20/20

Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams, began as a research and development project inside San Francisco podcasting company Odeo in March 2006. Now it has more than 7 million users and growing rapidly.

Twitter described itself as “Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”

Meantime, Twitter is described in Wikipedia as “Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.”

The short format of the tweet is a defining characteristic of the service, allowing informal collaboration and quick information sharing that provides relief from rising email and IM fatigue. Twittering is also a less gated method of communication: you can share information with people that you wouldn’t normally exchange email or IM messages with, opening up your circle of contacts to an ever-growing community of like-minded people.

But here’s the thing - you don’t have to listen to the incoming noise! You can ignore it if you choose to. Unlike email, Twitter is just ‘fly on the wall’ communication. On the other hand, if you have people following you, you hope they are listening so you can get your message across.

Every time you send out a tweet, all your followers will see it. Unlike blogs, Twitter is a real time broadcasting medium. You update, it is broadcast to your followers, and then it is largely forgotten (but not quite!)

The Benefits of Twitter

One of the main things that we’ve discovered about Twitter is that no two Twitter users are using it in the same way. Almost every Twitter user that we come across tells that they have a different objective when it comes to using it and are benefiting from it differently. But few common benefits were listed below:

• Interactive - The conversational format encourages participation. Twitter is great for collaborative projects. I’ve seen many tweets used for posting questions or taking informal polls.
• Social - Twitter gives followers and those being followed a chance to interact. Specially in business who you know is often as important as what you know. Twitter can help with that.
• Informal - Conversations on Twitter tend to be casual and intimate. People routinely tweet both about what they are having for breakfast and what project they are working on.
• Immediacy - Twitter’s real-time messaging means someone is almost always on Twitter, ready and willing to respond to any and all Tweets.

Twitter and Sri Lanka

Out of 7 million users in Twitter only handful of people are from Sri Lanka. They’re can be various reasons for this… but unawareness will be the #1. Also the biggest disadvantage may be the absence of mobile twitter post. But few non-IT companies were already stepping in to harness the power of twitter.

Countries like Sri Lanka with volatile and uncertain markets can directly get benefited by Twitter. Updated news are the driving force of this market.. But the broadcasting it is very expensive when it compared to other countries.., because of the less population and high inflation. The free tools like Twitter will add great value in broadcasting the latest message (for business it can be the marketing or promotional message) across, at least for the growing young and internet friendly generation.

Sri Lankans are very fond of Facebook. It’s very active and becoming a strong marketing tool as well. As per our studies; at least there is 2 -3% of the total population socializing in facebook. 90% of these are between the ages of 10 – 30. The some crowd will start checking out Twitter in the near future and will start blowing.

We have all heard the term “Web 2.0″. What does it mean, and how did the regular web evolved to this version?

The traditional Web formula has been static Web pages, where users take a passive ‘reading’ role when accessing sites. Web 2.0 is a collection of services that allow, among many things, greater community participation, content syndication, advancements in Web-based user interfaces, and a new breed of Web services that create an entirely new application platform.

Overall, dynamism and community. The regular user might say that this change was unavoidable and came by itself as a natural evolution. It’s not really like that.

Have you noticed the stickiness turning into syndication with RSS feeds? The online encyclopedias turning into Wikipedias where everyone can give their contribution? How about the personal websites turning into blogs? The web technique called domain name speculation that tried to anticipate the domain names turned into a totally new technique - SEO (Search Engine Optimization) that’s being developed worldwide.

Wikipedia defines Web 2.0 as “a phrase that refers to a supposed second generation of Internet-based services� such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies�that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users. O’Reilly Media, in collaboration with MediaLive International, used the phrase as a title for a series of conferences and since 2004 it has become a popular (though ill-defined and often criticized) buzzword among certain technical and marketing communities.”. I totally agree.

The main characteristics of web 2.0 are: applications integrated within web browsers, users contributing to a website’s content and a rich, interactive, user-friendly interface based on Ajax or similar frameworks.

Few websites are still using the 1.0 concept, and if they do, they’re not among the popular ones. How did the Web 2.0 integration affect you?