Color and Layout

I would like to share two web sites that I found helpful as I experimented with the color scheme and various layouts for my web site. All you have to do is walk into a Chinese restaurant and step onto the ubiquitous red carpet to know that red is an important color in the culture of China. I knew that different colors imply different meaning in different cultures, but this web site lists color symbolism by culture, which was fun to review. See http://webdesign.about.com/od/color/a/bl_colorculture.htm. So the purple of the energetic Team in Training web site in this country would have a completely different meaning, should one of the runners hail from Thailand (mourning).

I had a field day scrolling through dozens of web layouts at http://www.openwebdesign.org/browse.php?page=3. Many of them are designs for blogs, but others are simple web designs that different people have shared. I found this a good tool for generating ideas. Even when we see a layout we don't like, it prompts us to think about what we don't like about it, which is revealing in itself.