Pallasart's Tips to Using Color in Websites
Pallasart Web Design, established in 1996, focuses on the meaning of color when designing commercial websites. It believes that the key to developing a successful website is matching the sites color palate to the website’s visitors, the company’s products and services and the site’s main objective. Use Pallasart's tips to using color in websites to make your websites color design more effective.
Understand your visitors
What a color means is different to different demographics. For example, using bright, bold colors drives older visitors from your website, but draws young visitors to it. Make a list of who you want to attract to your website, and then use that to eliminate colors that are inappropriate.
Understand how colors communicate
Colors are linked subconsciously in our mind to certain concepts. For example, red can either mean “stop” or communicate aggression, but it can also communicate passion and romance. Green can relate fertility and growth, or envy. The color combinations you use, when paired with the theme of your site or product line determines the message with which your visitors leave your site.
Consider what you are trying to sell
Consider what you are trying to sell, and how color therapy relates to that field. Different colors activate different sectors in our brain and can have undesirable effects if used incorrectly. For example, blue is a natural appetite suppressant, so it should not appear on a site related to food.
Consider website use
Using heavily-saturated colors on the background of your whole webpage can make it hard to see where to click and to read information given on the site. You want to make sure that the colors you select do not inhibit consumers from using the website. The most saturated colors on your site should stay in product images or images that animate the service you provide. Never use heavily saturated color beneath text you want visitors to read or buttons you want visitors to click.
Your website is one of your most powerful tools to direct traffic to your business and generate leads. Every element of your website is selected with a purpose in mind, and that include colors. Select colors that stimulate visitors to stay, browse and buy, not colors that frustrate them and send them running.