In 2001, I wrote an article on how to choose colors schemes, which is still a top landing page on my site. Color has the ability to elicit all kinds of emotions, so picking a color scheme that will reflect the tone of your business (logo, website, business cards, etc.) is an important first step.

One of my favorite sites is color combos, which makes choosing complimentary colors easy and is great for researching color schemes.

This morning I came across an article entitled Color Psychology and Online Marketing, which not only discusses color theory, but also what to watch out for if your website is targeted toward an international audience. The last thing you want to do is insult your customers by using the wrong colors.

I am pleased to announce the launch of Aerovex Systems's new website. The site was developed in Joomla 1.5.x and features an online store geared toward high-end hair and nail salons. Search engine optimization was provided by Debi Norton of BRAVO! Interactive Media, who worked in collaboration with Indigo.

Thank you to Joomla developer, Jacob Hodara, for your help with the development of this project.

www.aerovexsystems.com

I'm into the third week of my Certified Social Media Strategist class and am relishing in the potential out there to stand ahead of the crowd. What I'm finding is that there is a lot of work to be done to get it right on the social web. Most of us just have the tip of our big toe in the water.

This week, we did a Four Quadrant Assessment assignment examining a company's brand, competition, customers and partners. My classmate and I tackled the customer assessment, and what we found is although Company X had a well-rounded social presence, they weren't very sociable—there was very little interaction going on between them and their followers.

Most of us don't like to be criticized, but if you look at criticism as constructive, you will find many opportunities to not only improve your products and services but also your relationship with your customers. Don't be one of those companies who ignore customer complaints on the social web; use this golden opportunity to listen to what your users want and engage with them. That's what social networking is about!!

Read Jay Baer's blog post: 70% of Companies Ignore Customer Complaints on Twitter.

Something weird happened over the weekend—one of my client's websites was hacked. To make matters worse, all of the files on the web server were erased. In my 11 years of developing websites, that has never happened… It was a new site, so we had a pretty recent backup of our own, but just imagine…

On Friday, I spent about an hour and a half making updates to the website, so I know for a fact before the weekend, everything was good. Like I usually do, I made a backup of the site with Akeeba Backup, but I didn't download the file to my hard drive, because I felt confident it was safe on the web server.

Big mistake!!!

In the past several days, I have exchanged a number of emails with the hosting company who didn't take responsibility for their server being hacked—instead, they pointed fingers at us for not choosing good passwords…

So why am I sharing this very embarrassing, hard lesson with you? To warn you to be proactive, make regular backups, and download backup files to your own server (e.g., computer). You need to protect yourself from evil hackers looking to do your business harm.