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Ewww...grosss By: Mark Morgan on 4/17/2000; 4:53 PM I'm a content guy; I couldn't design my way out of a paper bag, quite frankly. Particularly in terms of color. Navigation and layout I seem to handle without embarrasing myself horribly, but color eludes me. I asked some pros to have a look, and I can't say I'm unhappy with the result. The content is good, but the colors? That may or may not be another story. (Hey, if the content is good enough and the design doesn't get in the way, the color can be a little off and I don't particularly mind.) The great thing about the beautiful and elegant Conversant content management system is that I can make these kinds of global changes easily, particularly as the who engine is driven by Cascading Style Sheets. I haven't been using CSS because I've had enough pages crash on me to know it is not particularly for amateurs. But, Conversant automates a lot of it. So I'll be moving to CSS site-wide (I only have to add it to the few places where I've made the FONT tag explicit). So global color changes will be very easy. That's the kind of thing that I think will make content management systems very successful. By automating much of the grunge work (although not all), they free content creators to just work on the darn content and not have to fuss with everything every day. The words begin to show their value, when design is made easier. In hard financial terms: if a designer takes X amount of money to do your site because of its complexity, making things easier for the designer will save you money. Plus, it reduces the chances of some employee later on making some god-awful design decision for their department because they can't be bothered to read the design guidelines the company writes. With this template system, they just plug things into the template and voila! The entire company looks like the same company. (In fact, with Conversant you can have different areas have different templates, so the sales department can be subtly different from the tech support, and yet they still all look like they belong.) And changing the entire intranet? Fuss with the template, change the parameters in the CSS fields, and your site is brand new overnight. Assuming, of course, you have any color skills at all. Which brings us back to the question at hand: are my site colors bad? Reply to this thread and let me know, or e-mail me and let me know. I'm going to sit on the decision until some more opinions come in. My goal is to work some of the colors of the logo into the site, but what colors? Where? The dominant color is black, and when I experimented with black backgrounds I hated them. Green and yellow, maybe? And what green and yellow? Let me know.
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