The Colour of your Website – get it right and you’ll see the colour of money!
Colour is the first thing a visitor responds to when visiting your website. If it pleases, it will entice – your visitors most likely stay. If it doesn’t, they’re definitely gone! The colour of your site, your brand is your online presence – so you must get it right!
Colour is the supreme psychological selling tool. Applied correctly and integrated throughout all your marketing strategies, the company message will be powerfully reinforced, encouraging real interest and return visits, leading to sales conversions.
It is crucial that you seek advice from the professionals! Let an established and experienced web design company produce a number of options to your working brief. They will create site layouts, colour fields – and your logo – that are both, current best practice and future proof, whilst still distilling the core message of your brand in a compelling visual language!
If you already have a site that is more than 2-3 years old, then a website refresh can re-energise your brand presence and stimulate a revived interest. A new colour scheme with latest company pics/ visuals and updated use of graphics and font is simply, good housekeeping!
Getting colour just right is the same as any other component of online marketing. It involves ‘thinking outside of the box’, or in this case, ‘looking as if for the first time’. Remember – there are subtle meanings and unexpected overtones when attempting to combine colours for a particular desired effect.
Core colour theory is extensive, but here are just a few basic pinpointers:
Monochromatic : A single colour in varying shades. This can be a subtle, clean and arresting look for a web site. It produces a softer, calm or restful effect, especially in the blue or green hues.
Complementary : High contrast by selecting colours directly opposite from one another on the colour wheel (such as red and green). This places a warm colour immediately adjacent to a cool colour in order to stand out with greater intensity.
Three Part Colour : This scheme uses three colours equally spaced from each other around a colour wheel. Carefully and integrated, this is a particularly harmonious effect. Your website developer will almost certainly choose a background colour first and then select the next two.
Subtle changes of effect occur with lighter or darker shades of a colour and it’s worth remembering that, not only individually do we have different subjective responses, cultures have differing imbedded viewpoints with subsequent meaning too.
A few tips -
• It is easy to overwhelm people with too much black.
• Some shades of blue – or too much blue - can send a cold and uncaring message.
• Both red and yellow should be spot colour only, not a field colour.
• Adolescent girls are most likely to select nearly all shades of purple as their favourite colour!
• Both white and brown are symbols of mourning in some parts of the world!