Posted by Charlotte Lamb

A sunny and bright design in yellow and orange seemed the right answer when we were asked to design a website for Florida Home Owners Direct. The company had a striking logo with orange and purple and some great photography of the properties in Florida they maintain and let to holiday-makers on behalf of their owners. Keeping the design warm in colour reflected the climate of Florida and the cheerful colour-scheme also helped emphasise the fact that this site deals with holidays.

The site also needed some clever programming so the design needed to be flexible enough to cope with database driven content that would fill in boxes with text and pictures after a search of the site.

The site has grown over the years and there are now more properties and more information about the areas where the properties are located and all those attractions to visit in Florida. The site pages and the database have been able to cope with expansion and the site still looks easy to navigate and cheerful in design despite the extra pages.

The owner of the company now works in Florida but we are still able to implement changes and updates using email to communicate.

If you would like to visit the site please click here.

If you administer your own domain names, via your ISPs control panel, it is really important that you understand the different ways in which you can point a domain name at a website.

We have in the last week had 2 new customers who have selected the wrong method of pointing their domain names at their webspace.

The first had recently changed the name of their business and had purchased a second domain name and pointed it to their website using Web forwarding with a frame. The problem for them was they could not login into the admin area of their Blog via their new domain, they also could not get listed correctly in Google.

We helped them by making their new domain name the primary one associated with their website and set up a 301 redirect for their old domain. Now their Blog works correctly and they will over time the get correct listings in Google.

Our second customer had registered a domain name for a new business but then used web forwarding to point the domain name to their web space. This meant that even if you typed in their domain name the ISP’s domain name appeared as the address of their website. This made Google think that our customer had something to hide or they were trying to fool Google in some way, so they never listed the site.

Again, as with our first customer, we changed the way their domain was associated with their web space and they will now get their listing on Google.

I to Eye have written a newsletter on the subject of blogging and the benefits we think it can bring to any business. If you would like to receive the newsletter click the Home button at the top of this page and sign-up using the form on the home-page of our website.

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There is a theory that colour can have an effect on how we behave and affect our mood. Red is associated with danger, or excitement, and is supposed to raise our heart-rate. There are also those who believe this effect can be harnessed by sports-people who wear red to compete, think of Michael Schumacher in his red Ferrari, and the Chinese athletes wearing red vests at the Olympics.

It’s not just in sport that this effect may be at work, the colours used by companies in their logo, their brochure and on their website can be used to help reinforce their company’s personality to their customers.

Opposite to red is the calming presence of blue, and energising shades of green are supposed to remind us of the natural world. Yellow is warm and optimistic and reminds us of the rays of the sun in a similar way to orange, a vibrant colour with a tropical mood. Black and grey are sophisticated and often used with technological implications.

Because we may associate these colours with certain moods sub-consciously it can be useful to carefully consider the colours you use on the materials you use for your business. It may be better to use red prominently on your PowerPoint slides if you happen to sell safety equipment than if you run a health spa, in which case perhaps blue or green might be wise.

If you want to create the right impression with any of your marketing materials then call I to Eye on 01962 737989 and we’ll make sure they get your message across to your customers.