One facet of a well-designed website is its color scheme. The Choice of colors is vital in creating the look that the site's owner wants to portray. If the site's appearance does not meet the users expectations, then they will leave and probably never return to the site. This is often the reason why a web site is not doing as well as it should be.
Knowing all about color perception can make life a whole lot easier when deciding on a color scheme for a website. Knowing which colors can irritate and which can calm is important in giving the user the right impression and experience of the website. Why would you want to anger a user when you want them to buy from your web site?
Color contrast and balance is another technique to be aware of. It can be used to point users in the direction of to certain pages on the website.
Below is a list of the best-used colors and their emotional connotations.
Red is linked with strength, fire, blood and passion. If it is used sparingly on a light background, it can draw attention and ambition.
Blue is the most frequently used color and it can symbolize confidence, loyalty and royalty. The darker end can mean strength while the paler end can be used to represent fantasy and dream.
The color green can summarize feelings of durability, safety and harmony. It's also a capable color to use to highlight calm and relaxation.
Green is associated with trees, wealth & envy. The most calming color in the spectrum, it's extremely popular with web sites that are linked to nature.
White is linked to clean & simple designs, which means that it's favored by numerous design firms. It stirs up feelings of cleanliness, simplicity, honesty & innocence.
Stirring up feelings of passion, sex, fire & aggression, red is a highly charged color. The brighter side of red is bold, which means that it can be used to raise awareness.
Gray can be linked with respect, humility, decay & boredom. It's used heavily to conceive shiny gradients in designing websites to give a slick, modern feel to a web site.
Orange is related strongly to spirituality & healing. It's the color that symbolises Buddhism & it has a soothing energy about it. It's a bold color that is not as bright as yellow yet not a deep as red.
In website design, purple is not used very often, because because it is seen as a girly color. It's also associated with royalty, romance and wisdom.
Gray can be an odd color as it is not strong. It is used to make stylish, classy and calm web sites. It's used heavily on tech web sites.
The role of color is not just to make a website look good, it can be used to evoke feelings & emotions from the end-user. Choosing colors that anger the end user can have damaging effects on your site, whereas cleverly picking may mean that the site lives up to the user's expectations.
