Colours are at first glance such simple things. We all have our favourites and each colour makes each of us feel in different ways. Most of us are aware that science has shown us colours have the power to affect our emotions. But what most of us may not be aware of is that the effect any given colour has can change depending on the culture of the person viewing it.

When you are having a web design built for you and are asked the question “What colours do you have in mind?” your first instinct will probably be to list of the colours you find attractive. But in this case your first instinct may not be the right one. You need to carefully consider your target audience. Depending on their cultural background a given colour may have the exact opposite effect than you wanted to create.

Not convinced? Consider just three colours red, yellow and green:

The colour red:

   To the Chinese red can represent: Good luck and celebration
   In India red can represent: Purity
   In South Africa: red is a colour of mourning
   In Russia: red represents Communism
   In many Eastern cultures red is worn by brides
   In western cultures red symbolises excitement, danger, love, and passion

The colour yellow

     To the Chinese yellow indicates nourishment
     In Egypt yellow is a colour associated with mourning
     In India yellow is closely associated with business and merchants
     In Japan yellow is a colour of courage
     While in the West yellow symbolises cowardice and danger but also hope.

The colour green

     In China: Green is associated with unfaithful spouses and exorcism
     In India: Green is closely associated with Islam
     In the West green is a colour of spring, rebirth and new birth

So who is your target audience? Pick the colours that appeal to them
and your website will be more likely to reach your intended audience.

You can find some other excellent resources on understanding the symbolism of colour by following the links below:

About.com-Colour Symbolism

ColorMatters.com- Colour and Culture Matters

A lot of people have been inquiring about our search engine optimisation service and have been surprised to find it costs as much as it does. Many people seem to hold the understanding that it is a simple and easy process that can give quick and guaranteed results. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO as it is called consists of several factors. First there is the programming code used to build your website. This involves building clean, efficient code that is as easy for the search engine to index as possible. This also involves the limited use of meta tags. I say limited because many of the meta tags used in the past are at worst ignored or at best carry little weight with search engines.

The keyword meta tag has been so over abused that many search engines disregard it altogether. What is important are the Title tags, h or heading and image alt tags throughout the website and  content description and summary tags. Used with keyword tags they can give the search engine a snapshot of what that page is about and in some cases the tags may show up in the description under your link in the search results.

The key here is to write the tags for the site visitor, not for the search engine. Because the search engine is ultimately looking for the same thing the searcher is looking for. The next thing is links. When Google looks at the internet and sees Site A linking to Site B Google considers that a Site A voting for Site B and Site B is moved up in the rankings. Now one link is not enough, you need dozens if not hundreds to create any real impact in your search ranking. Not only do you need quantity of links, but you also need quality. A link from a ‘bad’ site like a spam directory will have no impact at best or at worse can even lower your ranking!

Which brings us to the number one, most important thing about SEO. Content. I will say it again. Content. Searchers want to find a page with lots of well organised content that matches what they searched for. If a searcher searched for green sweaters in Brighton he does not want to find a page about red sweaters in Reading and he most certainly is not interested in a page about purple dinosaurs in London!

Because searchers want to find what they are searching for, search engines want to deliver it. This means the search engines spend a lot of time (years) and money (billions!) in development of their technology.

It is often said there are three rules of real estate: location, location, location. On the internet content is location. NetroDesign’s SEO packages are designed to deliver properly optimized code, appropriate links and offsite content pointing to your website to deliver ranking and more importantly: traffic to your website.

This process is time consuming and that’s what you are paying for. Much of what we do can in fact be done by yourself, if you have the time to spend. Our fees are for the time and effort we spend on getting your site to rank higher and receive more traffic.

Before deciding to use our service ask yourself, what do you have in shortest supply: time or money. If the answer is time then let us handle it for you. You can rest assured that we will deliver the best results as efficiently as possible.