Studies have shown that talking characters can boost your sales and increase visitor depth. If you use SitePal.com, you can type in the text and the characters will say anything you type.

You can even record your own voice and use that instead of the pre-recorded voices that SitePal provides. (I'd recommend using your own voice because they don't have very many good pre-recorded choices.)

They are great for use on your homepage where you can tell your visitors what's new, highlight key web pages, and give them advice on how to navigate your site.

Customizing and adding the characters is easier than you may think. No programming is necessary. You do all the customization on SitePal's site, and they provide you with two snippets of code to place into your web pages. That's it!

Your visitors must have Flash installed on their browser to hear the characters talk, but these days that's 95% of most web surfers.

I've had so much fun playing around with this...especially trying to make the character look like me. :-) You can see my talking character on my homepage. I've also added one to my hex color page. Just hit the play button to hear them talk.

You can opt to have them speak on every page load but I figured that'd get very annoying to my visitors. I'd rather give people the option of listening to them or not.

If you want to try the talking characters for free, just go to SitePal.com.

I'm happy to announce that I've got some pretty cool HTML templates you can download for free at my site. The original templates I had were a bit prehistoric. I left them up for those who just want a basic design with no graphics. You can find them at the bottom of the page.

Enjoy my new HTML templates and bookmark this page because more will be coming in the very near future!

I get a lot of the same kind of emails from people because they are unsure of the entire website creation process. For example, what should they do if they want a message forum or how do they accept credit card orders.

I've created a quick website creation overview to help those who may need an overview of everything involved with the creation of their site.

Need help deciding the best color scheme for your site? Use my new hex color picker to generate a 4-color scheme for your design. Simply enter your main color and let the tool do the rest.

Try the color generator here.

Want to practice your HTML code online? I've just added a Flash-based HTML editor. It's good for beginners who want to generate some quick and easy HTML code on the fly.

Try the free HTML editor here.