Many people are oblivious to the profound effect that colour has on our daily lives. We often disregard the way colour elevates our experiences, amplifies our emotions and connects us to our environment.

The effects of colour are far-reaching, and its common functional applications include:

• Safety: Colour can be used to identify dangerous items, areas and procedures, reducing the risk of serious injury in many circumstances.
• Identification: Use of colour can asset in the recognition of objects, scenes, solutions or services, by leveraging a consumer's experience and knowledge to connect them with the target.

Colours convey emotions, feelings and ideas in a special and powerful way. Even if we rarely notice it, we are constantly being affected by them. Certain colours introduce particular emotions, and by leveraging this sub-conscious affectation in your web desig, strategy, you can increase your ability to reach (and connect with) your target audience.

Colours, and some associated buzzwords

• White: Minimal, Professional, Clear
• Black: Deep, Luxurious, Dramatic
• Red: Emotional, Personal, Hot
• Orange: Flamboyant, Joyous
• Yellow: Fresh, Vibrant, Happy
• Green: Natural, Healthy
• Blue: Cool, Relaxed, Calm
• Purple: Lush, Unique

There are plenty of resources on the internet to assist you in making the right colour choice, and we recommend you do your research before deciding on anything. It's important to remember that when it comes to the public face of your company, the opinions of your customers take precedence over your own. You need to find a way to make the public relate to your business if you want your marketing strategy to work effectively.

• GIF animations are not interactive. It is not possible to vary the animation or result through input by the viewer.
• Animated GIFs save every frame of an animation as a separate image, which increases file size. Large files are the enemy of the internet, as they slow down navigation and negatively affect the user experience.
• GIF images are limited to a maximum of 256 colours, which creates noticeable artifacts in images. The human eye can distinguish up to 16.7 million colours.
• Animations contained in GIFs must stay within the bounds of the image frame. They cannot be placed over other page elements without rendering them invisible.

The solution to the shortfalls of GIF was Flash, a product developed by Macromedia, and now owned by Adobe. Flash uses a number of new technologies such as vector drawing (where images are drawn using equations instead of co-ordinates) and scripting (allowing the developer to create richly interactive animation).

Flash has now been used on a huge number of Websites for over 10 years. The technology has simultaneously become far more powerful, and far simpler to use. Today, it is often considered to be the de-facto standard for interactive web design. Recently, however, a new challenger has risen that threatens to take that title away from Flash, and that technology is Ajax.

Ajax (Short for Asynchronous Javascript and XML, and originally labeled as AJAX) is an emerging standard for lightweight and impressive animation. The basic premise behind Ajax is that it uses XML (eXtensible Markup Language) to deliver snippets of JavaScript animation to the client in real-time. The result for the client a smoothly presented animation, which can be highly optimized for less-than-perfect connections.

There’s a lot of buzz flying around at the moment about W3C Compliance. What is interesting is the number of people who discuss it, but don’t really understand what it truly means. To have a thorough understanding of W3C Compliance, you need to understand its origins.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was formed in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee (The man widely credited with inventing the World Wide Web) as a group of web enthusiast, that would later be responsible for develop the standards that the World Wide Web would use.

The W3C worked hard to suppress the large number of incompatible and poorly established versions of HTML (HyperText Markup Language, the primary format of Web Pages). They endeavoured to adapt evolving technologies and methods, whilst still ensuring a high degree of compatibility and industry acceptance. To this day, the W3C remains the primary authority on Web standards.

When software manufacturers produce Web Browsers (Such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer), they build the browser engine (The central component of the browser, which is used to draw and format web pages) with the ultimate goal of achieving the highest degree of compatibility with W3C standards that is possible. By ensuring compatibility with the standards, they in turn increase the Web Browser’s ability to render (draw) W3C-compliant pages in a manner faithful to the designer’s vision.

In the early days of the World Wide Web, W3C Compliance was simple, as there was only one standardized Web page format (HTML), and only a few dozen HTML “tags” (Commands). In 2009, there are 28 W3C Standards, and over 1000 validated tags. This ever-increasing complexity makes it more difficult than ever for Web Designers to ensure 100% W3C compliance when creating websites.

It is worth noting that while 100% W3C compliance is achievable, and ideal, it is not a prerequisite for a high-quality website. Many popular websites are not 100% W3C compliant (Such as the Google search engine), yet are highly compatible with every major browser on the market.

Within the Web Design community, W3C Compliance is not just a viewed as a method of Quality Control, it is seen as a display of competence and dominance is the industry. Many major Website Design companies now produce 100% W3C Compliant website, with some even authoring websites exclusively in the XHTML Strict format (a variant of HTML that requires all code to be 100% valid and functional).

In Short, 100% W3C Compliance ensures the very highest level of compatibility for websites across a wide variety of platforms and devices. Whilst achieving 100% compatibility can be a tall order, putting in the extra effort to get that figure as high as possible will ensure visitors have the best experience.

Many people understand far more about good website design than they know. They know what makes a website attractive and effective seconds after they first view it. That’s because people autonomously judge everything about a website before they even consider using it. If you can’t capture the viewer within that split second, they’re gone.

The effectiveness of a website as a promotional tool can be decisively split into two categories: the short-term and long-term benefit. This is an important distinction as understanding how to exploit both will help you conquer the web with the minimum effort and resources necessary.

In the web design world, Aesthetics and visual design are usually viewed as a short-term benefit. Not just because styles and designs become outdated, but because after your potential client base have seen the site the first time, the visual impact it has on those viewers decreases. On the other end of the chart is usability.

Usability is best viewed as a long-term benefit. Some of the best websites on the internet have had minimal aesthetic changes since their inception (such as Google), yet thanks to an easy-to interpret, functional, reliable interface, these sites remain hugely popular.

Another major advantage of emphasizing Function over Form is that updating the functionality of a website can be a far more time-consuming process than updating its visual style. This could be likened to a house; you install the wiring and framework before you fit the interior, which makes it far easier to re-paint the house than it is to add internal wiring.

Many Web Designers already understand this balance, and routinely focus on the function over form mantra in everything they do. In Australia, BRTSPRK Media send out a regular newsletter which often touches on this issue, and relates the Form over Function analogy to many aspects of the world as a whole.

If you are looking to maximize the effectiveness of your online marketing spend, focusing on function over is a simple way to ensure “Bang for your Buck”, and keep visitors coming to your website for years to come. People will eventually disregard or ignore the visual elements of a website, but a functionally superior website will keep people coming back.