Color choices create an enormous impact on readability and presentation of content. Typically, black text over a white background is the most professional looking, although it is no less important for other colors to be used in the creation of text borders and other organizational graphics. When expertly manipulated, alternative color presentations can create a totally unique feel for the user. As a general guideline, colors with clear contrast between them are easiest on the eyes. Consult one of many hundreds of online color scheme charts to discover which colors work best together. Many of these guides were created by professional graphic designers.
CSS is an elegant language used to manipulate the stylistic characteristics of a webpage, such as color scheme, layout, font and borders. Unlike the old HTML-based counterpart of attributes such as “font face” and “font size,” CSS (Cascading StyleSheets) allows you to store all of your stylistic parameters within a seperate file, thereby freeing the rest of your page of redundancy and clutter. “Div” tags are a no less elegant way of organizing content. Unlike the archaic “table” tag, “div” tags can be comfortably nested within each other and easily controlled via CSS commands. Parameters such as margins widths, relative and absolute positioning, borders and others can be manipulated.
The potential for SEO exists within the HTML tags of a webpage as well as through online listings. For example, “h1″ tags create emboldened headlines, which search engines like Google consider to be especially important. Inserting an important phrase or keyword within an “h1″ tag (or “h2,” “h3,” etc) will give greater credence to that text than to regularly formatted text. Meta tags are useful in presenting abstracts of your webpage within the context of a web search. These tags exist within the “head” section of the HTML document only, and are otherwise invisible in the actual output of your webpage. For example, including < meta name=”description” content=”This website is full of useful content” >< /xml> in the head will make the text within the “content” variable show up in a search engine listing.
Last but not least, the benefits of using an efficient content management system allow you to have multiple people designing and creating content for your webpage while minimizing redundancy, and to control who has editing privileges for certain data. This is a valuable tool to have when working within the environment of a large office or community of employees.