If you have any ‘dress sense’, you’ll know that when you get dressed each morning it’s important to wear matching colors, or you’ll certainly look less well-groomed and professional, if not plain weird.

It’s also important to have a well-dressed website. Clashing colors are so hard on the eyes of your visitors, and they won’t stick around long enough to read your marketing message if you have a downright unpleasant color scheme.

On the other hand, if you stick to using ‘safe’ colors like black and white with dark red or navy blue accents, you will probably blend too much into the crowd of other websites out there in cyberspace.

The same thing can happen if all the websites in your field are using a faddish color scheme like blue and orange, and you follow the crowd. Following fads can also make your site look outdated very quickly.

So, what you need is a simple color scheme that is classic and helps you stand out – in a good way. But with the millions of colors out there, how do you know which to combine?

No, not emails that literally bounce. I’m talking about emails that people try to send in reply to a message they received, but nobody ever gets it. Why? Because the message was an automated email from a ‘no reply’ address, and all messages addressed to it end up in a blackhole in cyberspace.

You may have seen these types of email addresses before. Sometimes the email address itself is a message in itself – like no-reply@website.com. Some say, “This is an automated message… do not reply” and some ask you to click on a link to reply using an online form instead.

Do you have a ‘no reply’ email address? Even if you don’t, it’s quite possible that people could get a ‘no reply’ email when using your website. I’ll get to that shortly.

Civilization as we knew it ended with the creation of PowerPoint presentations – and I don’t mean that in a good way.

We used to fear bullets, now we fear bullet points. At least I do.

Much like websites, Powerpoint (and Keynote) presentations are brutally awful unless they are well-designed.

Before you design your next presentation, I implore you with all my heart to check out these two lifesavers first:

1. It takes less than 10 minutes to watch this video on YouTube on how to avoid creating the PowerPoint Presentation from Hell.

2. Go buy this book. It will revolutionize the way you create presentations – and I do mean that in a good way.

Beyond Bullet Points