The average newsletter generally has average photos: headshots, people shaking hands or talking on the phone. If you’re looking to invigorate your photos, try these tips.

Looking over the newsletters below, you may wonder if this is one of those personality tests based on your color preferences. And in some ways, it is.

In the “Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) — Getting Started” article, the first in this series, you learned how to use an external style sheet. You simply include one line of code on your pages to affect the entire page with the style specified in that external style sheet.

Web pages with readable text will generate more sales than fancy pages that are hard to read. Follow these design tips. Not only will your web pages be easier to read, but you’ll keep potential buyers at your site and position yourself to increase sales.

A Site Review Of Gaslamp.org By Julian Tandy of Nissan-Dakar.com.

Let me start this review by saying that I am based in Europe where 56K modems are the norm and broadband is unavailable for most users. I therefore always have download speed at the top of my agenda for websites and Gaslamp Org passed my first test with ease. The site downloaded quickly enough through my slow gateway, the home page is a mix of text and images so I knew what I was getting whilst waiting for all the images to download.

Overall, the site design is unpleasant to the eyes. The background is nice, and not too distracting, but is quickly overshadowed by the use of red and blue on top of it. This is a bad choice of color schemes. Look away from the site, and then look back, and see how long it takes your eyes to focus on the red print. Blue is historically a link color, and can be a distraction when used in the manner that this site uses it. I pick on reds and blues, because my company uses that color scheme, and wanted the intranet to be like this too, so I had a heck of a time making it work together. (See screenshot of my corporate intranet’s self help section which is all data driven using an SQL backend, your comments back are always welcome. You will notice the manner by which white space is used to separate the reds and blues).

The Gaslamp Quarter is a 16 & 1/2 block area in downtown San Diego. We are a nonprofit charged with marketing the area and bringing business to our merchants. Our site receives between 30,000 and 40,000 visitors a month seeking information on Gaslamp Quarter businesses and events.

Graphic design is an intimidating subject for many Internet entrepreneurs. However, most of us must learn some basic design techniques to avoid the high costs of hiring a professional graphics designer.

Color is a powerful psychological trigger. It creates strong emotions which can sometimes mean the difference between loosing or making that sale, so we need to know at least the basics of color.

In this article, I will present a method for creating a very simple shopping cart in PHP. I assume you have a basic understanding of PHP or knowledge of an object- oriented language like C++ or Java. I will first introduce object orientation in PHP, and I guess many of you feel comfortable with this topic, so you may skip on to the section that deals with object oriented code.

Colors have many meanings and associations. They can also create, or amplify, emotion. For example, which would you associate with bright yellow: happy or sad? Serious or playful? Good or bad? Chances are that you chose happy, playful, and good. Why? Because color speaks, whether we realize it consciously or not.

What colors have you chosen for your marketing materials? What were your reasons for making that particular choice? Was it because you liked those particular colors, or did you have a particular marketing message in mind? While visual appeal is an important consideration, your color choices could be sending a specific message to the people who view them. Are you sure you know what that message is?

Market researchers have had a field day identifying the colors and the likely effect they have upon us. However, the effects of color differ among different cultures, so the attitudes and preferences of your target audience should be a consideration when you plan your design of any promotional materials. For example, white is the color of death in Chinese culture, but purple represents death in Brazil. Yellow is sacred to the Chinese, but signified sadness in Greece and jealousy in France. In North America, green is typically associated with jealousy. People from tropical countries respond most favorably to warm colors, people from northern climates prefer the cooler colors.

Creating style sheets is fairly simple. To create a style sheet you will need to have some understanding of which selectors, properties and values work together. You can get that information in the CSS Properties section. Below you will find a downloadable example as well as an inline example.

In a world already full of acronyms and codes, who would have thought that something as simple as color could join in the confusion? Knowing the different color models and how they are used is not only helpful in getting the visual results you want it is critical to staying on budget.

In the last issue of DesignNewz, we covered the basics of cascading style sheets, their hierarchy, and how to reference them in HTML. In this issue we will go more in depth on style sheets, focusing primarily on the the basics of syntax.