My current client, for which I'm redesigning a website, printed out your piece on Choosing A Color Scheme. Good work. One question though: Where did you hear that in Japan, white symbolizes sorrow? I lived in Japan for six years and must have missed this. I attended funerals and everyone wore black just as in the West. I was married in a traditional Shinto ceremony and my wife's wedding kimono was most definitely white.

According to Roger Axtell, the author of Do's and Taboos of Hosting International Visitors, Copyright © 1990, white is used at Japanese funerals as a symbolic representation of hope, and white chrysanthemums are the flower of death in Japan. In Google I found many web pages corroborating the above. I did, however, note that red and white together is commonly found at Japanese weddings as those colors together are widely regarded as appropriate for happy and pleasant occasions.

For more information about the multi-cultural aspects of color, visit Color Voodoo.

Last year we got our own domain name and changed web hosting. I also redesigned our website in FrontPage. Our old website is coming up almost exclusively when I search. I've put automatic forwarding on most of the major pages (the old site was thousands of individual pages, so I can't change them all). I know it's been over a month since my last intense attempts to displace our old site with the new one. I'm afraid to take the old one down before the new one appears consistently.

Most of the major search engines consider redirects spam, so they may be hurting you more than helping you. Use them with great caution.

With regard to your website, does the new site mirror the structure of your old site, or is it totally different? When you redesigned your site, did you rename your pages? If your new site resides on the same server as your old site, you should be able to take advantage of the old pages sitting on the server. If you are using a totally different domain name, it is definitely possible to point your old domain to your new. This way, your old pages will continue to drive traffic to your new site versus being a dead link on the search engines should you decide to remove the old pages from your web server. I recommend leaving the old pages up. It takes a long time to build a presence in the search engines. The goal is getting people to your site. If they come in on an old page, as long as it links to your new site, it should be transparent to your visitors.

We've exhausted all the usual suspects but cannot get any font to display in our pages that is clean and small but readable like yours.

The font I use is Verdana. Because it is a sans serif font, is a good choice for website design. I use it a lot. One thing to be careful with when picking fonts for web publishing is that not all fonts are browser safe. There are only a handful that are pretty much installed on everyone's computer, such as Arial, Times New Roman, Courier New, Georgia, Verdana, and Geneva. Of course, the fonts installed on Macintosh computers are not the same as the PC, which is why you should list alternative fonts after your preferred font—just in case. For example, if you were going to use Arial, you would also include Helvetica (Mac version) and sans serif in your font tag. Fancy fonts are best left for graphic images. I do not recommend relying on non-browser safe fonts for page layout / typography as the end result may prove embarrassing.

I wanted to see if I could tell what would make your Grief Loss Recovery site stand out and make it the number one search result for the phrase “grief poems.” I don't see it. How do you do it?

I know that on the surface it's difficult to see how www.grieflossrecovery.com earns a number 1 ranking in Google for grief poems, but I think what helps is that the site is highly themed to grief, has lots of poems about grief, and each of the poem pages is titled “Grief poem: [title of piece].” Plus, my site offers original content that you can't find anywhere else. When I optimized the site for grief poems, I didn't just focus on the home page—I optimized all of the pages, and the site is 350+ pages. It was a lot of work, and I only touched the surface. There is still a lot to do. Another thing that may be helping my ranking is that I have established linking partnerships with complementary websites. In my opinion, all of these components are crucial for a successful SEO campaign.