There is a very specific reason to why I have used this phrase. By using capitals I was forcing people's eyes to notice the phrase, which the colours do also. The reason I used red letters for DO NOT is because it is negative, and the green lettering for the rest is obvious because it is positive. The thinking behind this is that it is a conflicting command. The red letters are telling people to not do something, which usually makes them curious and gets them to do it. And by using green letters I am encouraging people to remember what they want to do. I also purposely did not want to put a URL in the actual forum signature because I wanted people to actually phsycically type it into google, and therefore severing the association between the forum and the blog.
The first forum I used this on was on the Star Sonata forum, (a review of this game will follow in a couple days). I am planning to move this to other forums and possibly into poster advertising in the real world. My University would make a great place to try this idea out.
Anyway, it is still early days and the increase in page hits might be a fluke, we'll see. If you are one of those people that googled this blog because of the Star Sonata forum then leave me a comment or give me a PM on the SS forum so that I can guage what Kind of response I am getting. Also keep your eyes peeled for more interesting posts. (Yeah, i know...not many here at the moment. Chances are I will be changing the setup slightly so that there are at least two posts a week on predefined topics).
Final Thought Byte : Only thought is that if this works I'll let you guys know in a later post.
