Site Templates: Colors of Success
July 1, 2009 – 5:48 am, by Irene @ SkalfaConducting an online business on the web, you get to understand that the main impression you make on your target audience is visual impression. ‘Clothes count…’ – this old saying is more than true when it comes to attracting potential members to a dating site or a social network. So choosing the right template is almost as important as choosing the domain name, which is going to be your website’s ‘trademark’. It will help to create a certain mood to your members – either cheerful and ready-to-make-friends or sensual and appealing – depending on the site conception. A carefully chosen social network template can make an occasional site visitor feel interest and finally stay a part of your online community for long. While a poor and tacky-colored design will definitely ‘help’ you lose a potential member in a flicker. And that’s the reason why a whole division in marketing studies the influence of various color combinations to consumers’ activity. Below you will find a few examples of what emotions people associate with different colors, and how you can use this psychological tool depending on the goals you want to achieve.
Black – is a very strong color. It is a color of authority, stability and power. It is also associated with elegance and luxurious classics. It makes other colors look ’sharer’ and helps to create an atmosphere of mystery. Since it evokes strong emotions, too much of black may be overwhelming for your site members, so try to dilute it by adding more bright colors.
White – is associated with innocence, purity and simplicity. It has a calming and stabilizing influence. It does not irritate the eye and allows for a relatively large number of colorful components (if chosen as a template background).
Red – is a color of love, passion, excitement, aggression and energy. It’s the color stimulating all kinds of appetites. So it’s an indispensable color for those creating adult websites.
Blue – is likely the world’s favorite color. It is associated with calmness and trustworthiness. The darker shades of blue are ideal for businesses, as they symbolize financial stability, professionalism and loyalty. White-and-blue templates are ideal for business networks. Light blue colors give a feeling of freshness and cleanliness and get you in the careless mood.
Yellow – implies laughter, sunshine, happiness and amusement. Yellow color helps our brain release more serotonin, which makes us feel cheerful and energetic. Using this color in the right place and amount can become a powerful tool for involving new members into your social network.
Green – is known to be a relaxing color associated with nature, money and health. It is pleasant for the senses and has a calming effect.
Orange – color is tied with fun, pleasure, energy, warmth. An interesting thing is that it can make expensive products seem more affordable. This color is sharp and vibrant and implies anything but calmness.
Golden – is considered to be a color symbolizing wealth. Having a few golden components in your design will give it a classy look drawing attention.
Grey – is associated with solid and practical things. Silver color (a hue of grey) represents high tech. Too much of grey in design will most likely leave a dull impression. But adding just a few grey components will give that necessary rock solidity to your website (especially if that is a business network).
When choosing a design for your site, give strong attention to the color combination, which should be harmonious and selected in accordance with chromatic color scheme principles.
Take a look at one of the examples of a ‘color wheel’
So, here are some basics on color combination, which will hopefully guide you in the right direction:
Monochromatic color scheme – is based on combining different shades of one color segment (for example, darker and lighter shades of blue). Such design gives a site a pleasant, clean and integral look.
Complimentary color scheme – is using contrast colors, which are opposite to each other on the ‘color wheel’. Such warm-and-cold combination will look fresh and lively. One of the best examples of such scheme is combining light green and pink.
Triple color scheme – is built on using colors equally standing out from each other in the chromatic circle (such as red, yellow and blue).
Analogue color scheme – uses three color segments neighboring each other in the color circle. Such design will be colorful and harmonious.
Also, don’t forget about your target audience ethnic habits. For example, Asian people prefer red color, while the Dutch incline to orange.
SkaDate community script offers a wide range of site templates to meet your taste and needs. But we also thought of our customers who want to be different from others. SkaDate dating software designers will be happy to assist you in giving your site a unique look either by developing a custom template or by integrating your own design into the script.
Remember that people do judge by the cover. So, give it a strong attention as this is one more step to the top of success.
As usual, you are welcome to leave your comments. I will be glad to read them.
Best wishes,
Irene
Although introduced not so long ago, the sms-billing service has been coming to the fore among the well-known and trustworthy payment methods. What is the reason for its growing popularity?
number of sophisticated steps. SMS-billing meets all these requirements providing security along with mobility. No need to expose the credit card details, no need to wait for the transaction to be completed – with sms-payment you get what you want instantly, no need to think about cash – short messages are relatively cheap, and you take these expenses as a part of your monthly telephone bill (which is also an important psychological aspect).
This payment method is convenient and beneficial not only for consumers (site members in our case), but also for vendors. First of all, if you are on the second team, it gives you an opportunity to make the subscription for your site easier and more affordable. Imagine the situation with a Free member, who receives an offer from another user to chat tête-a-tête, but his membership does not include the private messaging service. Most people being in his shoes would prefer paying only for this particular feature (by pressing a few buttons on their mobile device and getting instant access to the desired service) as opposed to purchasing the monthly membership through one of the online payment providers, which would take more time, trouble and funds. Well, I would… as well as the major part of the European countries’ population. It does not mean that sms-payments have to be a substitute for your traditional membership plans, but they can be a great add-on to the process of monetizing your online dating business. A simple calculation shows that depending on the number of your site members and the fee you set up for the site services, you could get hundreds to thousands dollars daily on top of income from subscriptions.
Representing a well-known software company – which is 
already present in the program). You could modify the script by yourself (if you have enough coding knowledge), or leave that to our high-skilled developers team. Another option is visiting the 
Logically, we have come up to the moment, where I should start speaking about the disadvantages of using sms-billing for your online venture. One is that this payment method is yet to strike root in the USA, where people still prefer tried-and-true PayPal, CCBill and Authorize.net… And for now I can’t think of any more cons, so if you have thoughts on this aspect – you are most welcome to share them by leaving the post comments.
Be attractive for potential members!! Sounds pretty banal…. It is quite a logical assumption that a ‘busy’ site is a synonym to success. The more members surf through your site – the more traffic they generate, thus making the site very attractive for advertisers. Not to mention the direct flow of funds from your site members who pay for subscriptions. And behind all that stands a carefully chosen site concept that will allow you to find your niche in the competitive world of dating industry. How does SkaDate help? Well, in many ways.
‘Divide and rule’ What would that mean in terms of running a dating site? Right now we are speaking about the policy of managing the membership types intended to motivate your site members for subscribing to paid plans – thus, to increasing your funds. The membership types system in SkaDate software is perfectly optimized for you to ‘play’ with site services by making some (or even all) of them available only to a certain membership. This will inspire Free members to go for subscription in order to be able to experience the full range of helpful and entertaining 
Advertise, Advertise and… Advertise!!! An essential part of your ‘profit-aimed’ strategy is advertising, so we have come up to the most important component of your success-building. Let’s say, your site conception does not stipulate a paid membership system, at least at the beginning when you need to get your site live and full of members. Does that mean that you will have to operate at a loss? Not at all. The Google Almighty is there to help. It offers you a tool to make your site a profitable business. That is Google AdSense. All you need to do is place the text, image or video advertisement administered by Google onto your website and get paid on a per-click or per-impression basis. Yes, it is that simple!
Time to succeed! Now that you have chosen a path of online dating industry to follow, you will see how interesting, exciting, partly complicated, but satisfying this venture can be. The main advice is ‘test and analyze’. Don’t be afraid to play with the software opportunities and ways to attract potential members. Carefully study the response to each step of your marketing strategy, make conclusions, try new advertising moves and be confident about the result.
