Hey guys,

I just changed over our template.

I know the green picture at the top isn’t “home business related” and I’ll replace it at some point soon.

The reason for the change has to do with the way people “view” web sites. One of the things I’ve been reading is that people still are naturally drawn to blue underlined links.

My old web template had yellow text on top of a red background. Although I liked the way it looked, it isn’t way people traditionally look for. According to what I have been reading from “eye tracking” studies on people viewing web sites is that they still look to the upper left corner first and scan across, and that there eyes are drawn to blue underlined links. They just scan the page quickly and within 5 or 6 seconds have decided whether they way to read more or whether they want to click on the back button.

This design didn’t originally have blue links, but I liked the clean design. I changed the links to blue and added the underlines.

My blog software is WordPress and they have tons of templates designers have created for you. You can select one of their templates and make a few minor modifications. Wha-la you have a brand new template in a short period of time.

If I had to write one from scratch it would probably take me at least all day to do. I’d have to make changes test them, make more changes, over and over again.

This way I can download a bunch of templates, then turn each one on and see how it looks. If I don’t like it I try another design. Once I’ve picked the template I like, I can go in and start modifying it. Thankfully most designs now use a StyleSheet. The Stylesheet controls all the links and colors and stuff for the page. I can simply go into the style sheet and change the background color for the the entire web site, or change the link color to blue, etc.

This saves me hours of work and allows me to get back to the important things (like writing blog entries, marketing my business, etc.)

What do you think of the new template?

What do you think about the green picture at the top? Any ideas for what I could replace that picture with?

Leave me a comment and let me know what you think!

- Ben Fitts

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