Colour Schemes are the Hardest to Pick When Building Your Website

Written by Mark Gerrard, added 12/8/2007  

Colour schemes are the hardest to pick when building your website.

Why?

If your favourite colour is mauve, this may not translate into a website that is eye-appealing to potential customers. Also, you text and content may be hidden behind that colour.

Your customer might leave right away after seeing a grotesque colour scheme, so having the right colours can change the appearance and initial reaction to your website.

However, since there are infinite colour schemes, which ones will best suit you?

When designing a website, not only are you designing functionality and accessibility, you are also designing readability or eye appeal. This is different from websites that use flash to entice the visitor. Flash sites also have the disadvantage of not having the search engines being able to view a website that is entirely made of flash.

The colours should be ones that suit you, however suit the customer more. Reds, blues and orange/salmon and black on white have dramatic impact on how you perceive. For example, red has been used to demonstrate a call to action (for example, ‘buy’ can be placed within a red context because you wish the customer to ‘buy’ your product. You can place headlines in red; however, if you place the wrong headline in red, you won’t have buying customers. Red is a very powerful message marker. Use with caution.

Blue is used to have a calm experience. For example, some yoga and meditation websites will use blue to calm and red to entice their visitors to ‘buy’ their meditation services.



Some other sites have used orange/salmon to great effect. These colours can also entice visitors to find out more about your products and services as well as a combination of black and white text and background.

Traditional black on white background is still very useful. This is the basic colour scheme that we are all used to seeing and will also convey your message. What you can do is incorporate some of the other colours and see how they best suit your website and you business goals.

Colour enhances the images we see. When this is applied to website design it’s important to have your customer in mind. Determine which colour scheme works best for your website and continue to test. Once you’ve found a colour scheme that works, leave it. This will ensure your website business success.

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