There are many things that can make a big difference for your website, but one of the things that will have the very largest impact is altering the colors. By altering colors on our websites, we can change the impression that our sites make on someone, we can alter the order in which they direct their gaze around the sites, and we can generally alter the entire experience.
So here we will look at the various different effects that colors can have on your website, and we will look at some suggestions for choosing your color scheme now.
First of all, when you choose your color scheme you should think about the effect it has on someone psychologically. Different colors here evoke different emotions, and so by changing your palette you can alter the feelings someone has toward your site.
Color and Emotion
Orange for instance is an aggressive color. This will want to be use sparingly then and can be used to encourage people to move on. For instance in fast food joints the coloring is often orange and the reason for that is that it encourages people to leave thus ensuring a quick turnover of customers. Meanwhile light blue is a tranquil and relaxing color, so by using blue you can help your customers to linger on your pages which is better for getting people to actually read your content. Black meanwhile is elegant – so ideal for websites selling design services or jewelry, while dark blue is corporate and professional making it ideal for subjects such as finance.
Association and Brand
Another important thing to consider when selecting your colors is what associations they carry with them. For instance if your site is about “going green” or about money, then green is a good coloring. Likewise if your site is about love and romance, then red can carry the kind of associations you are looking for.
You also want to think about branding, and the color scheme of your company itself. If you have a log then what color is that? What color are your products? And what color are your stores/offices decorated? In this respect you need to think of your website as an extension of your business, your marketing strategy and your brand rather than as a separate entity. Make sure that your site visually matches your business and that you have a grand over-arching strategy for your marketing and your public awareness rather than thinking of each part of your business as a separate and independent entity.
Directing Gaze
At the same time you can use color in order to direct gaze around your website, and to affect what people look at first/how long they look at it. For instance if you have a section of your website that is bright yellow or bright red, and the rest of the site is largely more neutral in hue, then this is the area where people are going to look first. This then makes that perfect for signs reading “NEW” or “BUY NOW”.
Contrast and Clarity
Lastly you need to think in general about the contrast and clarity for your website and how your color achieves that. Black on white is the old favorite simply because these are opposites that look crisp and easy to read on the page. Other good colors though are navy on white, or even white on black. However you must avoid color combinations such as red on green or blue which can be tricky to read and even look blurry. If reading your site gives someone a headache, then they aren’t going to want to stay there long or come back again for that matter.
Jeet is freelance technical writer who loves to share his experience while working on cloud servers and cloud server hosting via his blog. In professional life he is Administrator at www.directoryroll.com.