Choosing a perfect color combination for a website can be a challenging task for any designer. Colors do not only influence a website's appearance and style, but they also communicate with visitors. Colors are an important way of creating a good first impression of your brand. Right Color management helps you to build your online business identity. The colors you choose for your website can impact your success to an extent. It also impacts your website bounce rate metrics. (Bounce rate: It is the percentage of visitors to a particular website who are leaving the site after viewing only one page without navigating other pages on the website.)
A good consistent color scheme can create a recognizable branding for your business or website. According to studies, people make 90% of judgments based on colors alone, as they are directly related to the psychology of customer behavior.
The psychology of colors
Basically, Colors set the underlying tone for emotions. Here are a few points which will help you to understand the psychology of color schemes.
Red represents excitement, energy, passion, desire, powerful.
Red is an extremely energetic or stimulating color. It is more effective in triggering strong emotional reactions. It gives the impression of speed and power. The restaurant businesses use red color to stimulate the appetite.
Orange represents welcoming, cheerful, confident, optimistic
Orange is a warm and vibrant color. The orange color represents friendliness & creativity. More use of this color can create a welcoming feel for your visitors. Generally, the Orange color attracts impulse shoppers.
Yellow represents happiness and cheerfulness
The light yellow color is communicating positivity and warmth. Yellow color can be used to grab the attention of your audience. This color can be used for designs concerning children. Dark shades of yellow give the impression of antiquity and age. Studies also join this sunny and bright color with motivation, Light yellows can help in increasing concentration, while brighter yellows can help in increasing memory.
Green represents peace, hope, refreshing, balance, and growth.
Green color reflects nature, freshness, and growth. It also represents wealth, health, and tranquility. Using darker shades of green color while representing consistency and stability. It represents balance and harmony in design as well. It often associated with profitable business models.
Blue represents trustworthiness, dependability, professionalism, honesty, authority, intelligence, calmness
The color blue is often associated with calm and relaxing emotions. Blue emits feelings of inner security. Dark blues are excellent for corporate and business designs. Light blues can be used for social websites that represent calm and friendliness. Blue is often used in businesses and banks to create trust in the brand.
Purple represents royalty, creativity, imagination, quality, individuality, dignity.
The purple color is historically linked to richness and royalty. It has a calming effect on people. Dark shades of purple characterize wealth and luxury. Light shades of purple can be associated with spring and romance. The Purple color often used in beauty and anti-aging products. Ensure to pick this color for the websites associated with these businesses.
Pink represents innocence, sweetness, femininity, romance
The pink color often related to love and women. It also used in products which are especially for women and young girls. If your business or website related to these products, ensure to use pink color for better leads and conversions.
Black represents classic, elegance, power, fear, modernity
Black is the most powerful color among all others. It attracts attention faster than other colors. That’s why it is most commonly used only for text and accents. When used as a background, black is able to create a feeling of luxury and deepness. It often used in luxury brands to evoke professionalism and uniqueness.
White represents purity, clarity, simplicity, cleanliness, openness
When the white color used as a primary color, it is able to provide a “clean” feeling and focus the visitor’s attention on important elements such as contrasting call-to-action-buttons, etc.
Gray represents neutrality, simplicity, logic, calm
The color scheme with gray as a primary color creates a feeling of formality that’s why gray is so popular in the business world. Gray is associated with technology and industry.
Here are the examples of industries related to color schemes,
- White & blue for the medical industry
- White or light color for an e-commerce website
- Dark colors for video games website
- Black & white color for an advertising agency
- Multi-colored for children’s website
- Blue color for finance
- Red color for retail
Tips to create the best website color schemes
- Limit the numbers of colors on your website
- Make use of shades and tints.
- Tint: Mixing white to a pure color.
- Shades: Mixing black to a pure color.
- Avoid using pure black. Always add a bit of saturation to your color.
- Try to follow the 60- 30- 10 rule
- The 60% will be the primary color of your site and set the overall tone of your design.
- The 30% should contrast with 60% to create a visually striking effect.
- The 10% is an ‘accent color’, which should complement either your primary or secondary color.
- Never choose a background that makes your text or content hard to read. Make sure your text and background colors contrast
- Think about your audience. If your website targets an international audience, you should try to pick colors that fit with different cultures
- Find colors that represent your brand.
- Don’t neglect white
- Use richer colors for prominent items.
- Use richer colors for prominent items.
- Avoid fluorescent craziness.
- Use bright primary colors for your call to action.
Conclusion
The right choice of colors for your business websites can greatly influence the results of your online objectives such as lead generation, conversion, etc. A deep understanding of color schemes and the psychology behind them can help you in implementing the right choices of colors in your products, designs, logos etc.
