Friday, April 4, 2008

Choosing The Right Colour For Your Website


Colour plays a very important role while designing your website for a better return on investment. A website’s effectiveness as a sales tool can be greatly affected by simply changing its colours.

All of us are aware of the fact that it is more difficult to read text on a monitor than it is on paper, so one should be very careful while choosing the colours for your website. Some colour combinations are very hard on the eye, such as a yellow text on green background. The reason you see black text on a white background so often is that it is the easiest colour combination to read, both on and offline.

We need to realize that some colours evoke different emotions. For instance:

Green is often associated with freshness;
White means purity; and
Purple is associated with royalty

Colours also have both positive and negative associations. Some common colour associations are listed below:

Red:Positive: Sense of power, strength, action, passion, and loveNegative: Anger, forcefulness, danger, impatience, violence and revenge

Yellow:Positive: Brightness, warmth and joyNegative: Caution and warning

Blue:Positive: Cool and tranquil, patience, comfort, loyalty and securityNegative: Fear, coldness, passivity and depression

Orange:Positive: Warmth, friendliness and cheerfulness, excitement and energyNegative: Ignorance

Green:Positive: Nature, growth, freshness and soothing Negative: Envy, greed, guilt and jealousy

Black:Positive: Dramatic, sophisticated and stylish, seriousNegative: Evil and death

White:Positive: Pure, fresh, easy, cleanliness or goodnessNegative: Blind, winter, cold, distant

A major goal in marketing is to evoke emotion in your audience. By choosing the colours for your website with care, you can evoke an emotional response that will increase sales.

As a general rule, one primary colour and two secondary colours should be chosen. These colours should be based on the specific target market you want to attract. If more than two or three colours are used websites tend to look chaotic, and the power of any one colour. The best advice is to keep it as simple as possible.

In designing your business website your colour choice is vital. Be sure to try different colours, different shades, and different combinations before you make your final choice.

So the choice is yours whether you want your site to be one of the most visited website with a maximum return on investments.

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