I’d like to apologize if this post is haphazardly done. I’m away from my computer and in an internet cafe somewhere in the southern part of the country.

Now we’ll talk about one of the things that make web sites different from just another text full of words: hyperlinks or, for the sake of brevity, links. Specifically, link colors.
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We were blogging about text : what to do with it, how to present it, how not to abuse it.

2. Colors. Text is for reading, so it’s important that it’s actually readable. You’d think that people would remember something as simple as that. Too often perfectly good text becomes unreadable when presented in unfortunate colors. Sure, you have a dark, gothic nature, but red text against a black background is not a way to convey it. What it does show is a lack of imagination and people will come to the conclusion that you’re as annoying as your web site.
   
   There’s a reason why most books are printed with black ink on white paper : the text looks nice, clean and crisp so the reader can focus on the content. So you’re better off sticking to dark text on a light background. Especially if you’re a beginner.
   
   Of course this applies to longish text. For titles, banners and menu buttons, you can go crazy a little.

There’s one item I forgot when I wrote the previous entry Test-drive your new web site.

5. Different monitor resolutions. Start with 800×600, as this is the lowest resolution one can reasonably expect viewers to be using (yeah, I know you can go 1280×1024 with your LCD monitor, hotshot, but not everybody has that). Then test your site with 1024×768 and higher resolutions.

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If your non-IT company doesn’t have its own web department and you hire a web development firm to make your website, you will need to be a little tech savvy to make sure you end up with a site that’s well-made and suited for you.

Now, developers don’t really like the clients breathing down their necks while they’re working, so I wouldn’t suggest doing that. What you can do is test the product before you sign off. This way, you know if there are any final changes that need to be made before you go live with your site.
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I love RSS. As a voracious reader of blogs, my RSS aggregator (Mozilla’s Thunderbird) is one of my favorite tools running in my computer. With it, I am updated whenever any of the blogs on my watchlist has fresh content.

Yesterday, I got to wondering what might be the easiest, brainless, most cost-free way of creating an RSS feed for sites that are not blogs and are not running on any content management system (CMS). After all, one shouldn’t have to be forced to turn your corporate, hobby or personal website into a blog just so one may have an automatically updated RSS feed. Sure, you can go manual and make and regularly update an XML file to serve as your RSS, but not only does this require coding (and therefore, thinking), but it’s tedious.
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In my entry about creating a podcast with WordPress, I said I’d talk about how to make a podcast with Blogger in a later entry. However, I realized that Peter of [blog.forret.com] already wrote a really good entry on that topic, so I give you the link to that article.