How to Choose Colors for Web Design

One of the real (unfilled) market niches in web design is a designer that knows how design affects conversion -- ecommerce conversion, lead gen conversion, home page bounce, etc. When I hire someone to design a website, I'd love it if they were aware of the following sorts of considerations, and had well-grounded opinions on how to use design to address them:

• How different colors encourage or discourage people from buying, or even from sticking around for a second click.
• How images (of people, of products, of pets) affect whether people will buy, register for my site, click on a link.
• How design affects download time for webpages, and how download time affects people's willingness to stay on a site.
• How a/b or multi-factorial testing works, and why that matters for a designer.
• How to balance the SEO value of actual text, vs the "it looks pretty" value of images of text.

And there are a thousand more issues like this. None of the designers that I've ever worked with have ever even thought these issues were important, much less thought that they were a fundamental part of their job.

Anyway, end of rant. But here's a useful article that talks about some of the implicit meanings of color.

Develop many "thin sites" or one deep site?

Just thought I'd give some link love to Andy Sweet, who's wrestling with some interesting issues related to simultaneously developing an entire portfolio of domain names.