How much does color affect your website design

SenseiSteve

HD Moderator
Staff member
Not every demographic perceives website colors in the same fashion.

Selecting which color theme to use – when developing your website often comes down to selecting a pre-coded theme that appeals to you specifically, but will your target audience perceive it the same way? After all, color is a perceptual characteristic of light. We see the visual spectrum in colors of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet, but we also perceive color by its chroma, intensity, saturation and luminance – and more importantly, globally we perceive the same color schemes quite differently by regions and cultures.

How much does color affect your website design?
 
Color is a big part in our world for sure. Red is one of those colors that can spark fear, intensity, anger, negatively and a range of other emotions. It's also used to bring attention to something, so it's not always a bad thing.

That said, years ago we changed our main site colors from "Red" to "Blue". While our name is Big RED SEO, we changed just how often we use Red on our site. The change wasn't done lightly, but after split testing, and chatting with clients (important part), we made significant changes. Gone are the Titles in Red and even pictures of ourselves were found to be better received in Black and White rather than in full color.

Every business is different. Coca-Cola is a brand that is known for it's red color, but personally I find the footer hard to read due to how much red is in it. It's fine in the logo and menu, but the footer is overwhelming and I'd rather see it in Black or White. You'll notice even the "Read More" or "Learn More" type buttons are BLACK instead of RED. https://us.coca-cola.com/products/coca-cola/

St. Louis Cardinals are another that are known for their Red, but you'll notice they use a muted red color. I still think their home page is glaring during initial load and should be changed to black - especially since when the page is done loading, it goes to black. Seems odd to show a wall of red - https://www.mlb.com/cardinals
 
I like blue and I have always designed my websites blue. I think it's a calming color and generally liked by most people.
 
Color is also useful to convey certain feelings and emotions. Depending on the purpose of the website, different colors may convey different feelings.

But also, not every color can be dropped into any design gracefully. It takes a lot of planning.
 
Colors, pictures, text .. all that combined gives a pleasant and suitable for your audience webpage. However, there are quite a few scientific papers which deal with colors and how they affect people if you want to dive into that subject.
 
The biggest thing i've learned here is a simple take away from chinese, chinese view red as a color of luck, while most of us look at it as dominant, danger. Hardly ever seen on western websites.

I've looked at websites around the world when looking for inspiration in designing a new website and let me tell google a industry in the uk and then the same industry in say... australia and look at a few websites and you will start to see trends.

THis tells me people are designing according to demographics.

No1 rule of web design you aren't designing for yourself. This transcends color it also means parallax scrolling, lovely images, heavy animation... some people don't like that, some guys like the specs and don't give a hoot about images. You may think its cool, I mean I did. It's a hard one to get past. You are designing for your clients and that's what you need to remember.

These days things are so segmented and personalized that you really need to know what colours are best suited to those you want to sell to and it varies by industry, by country... demographics, age whatever ect ect.

There is no one size fits all here answer here, not even close imo, as long as you don't put black on black.
 
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I like skyblue color and I design my website in skyblue, as per my opinion User Interface are big impact on website visitors, lead generation
 
Color effect on website design

There is meaning behind every color, color is very important for designing a website it increases brand recognition & influences the target audience. So we should be very picky to choose color for designing a website.
 
Choosing the effective color palette is extremely essential to communicate and promote your products and services. Many people believe that coloring isn’t that significant, but it is a completely wrong belief as it helps in communication far more than most people realize. Many websites these days suffer from the negative effect of wrong colorization as they choose colors to dress up their websites without any regard to their objectives.

* Blue to Cultivate user trusts
* Blue is the color of corporate America and it says, “Chill . . . believe and trust me . . . have confidence in what I am saying!”
* Green is a Call to Action Color

And so there are different meanings for different colors.
 
The knowableness of brand depends on 80% from colour registration that causes the trust of consumer. In internet-marketing a situation is no less serious - a color substantially influences on the indexes of sales. 42% customers are formed opinion of web site on the basis of his design, including due to a colour gamut.

The choice of color in a great deal depends on an audience. First of all the question is about the division of audience on a gender sign. There is a stereotype that most women love a pink color. It appears on business, that, in spite of the fact that a pink color from the point of view of psychology of color is associated with tenderness, he is a darling for insignificant part of women. Among unloved colors most often mention orange, brown and grey. In an order to improve the attractiveness of the web-site oriented to the woman audience, it is recommended to use blue, violet and green colors, because exactly their women mention among preferable. Men do not love violet, orange and brown colors, that it is necessary to avoid in registration of the web-site oriented to the masculine audience. Instead of them it is necessary to use blue, green and black colors that is traditionally associated with courageousness. About these and other interesting facts about a color read here. At the choice of colour decision besides the division of audience on a gender sign maybe and division of customers on the peculiar to them model of behavior. For example, orange, black and blue colors with most force attract customers apt to the impulsive purchases.
 
even pictures of ourselves were found to be better received in Black and White rather than in full color.

I find this quite interesting, and I wonder why that is. I'm a big fan of black and white pictures but I actually can't say why really.

One of the most important things in colour choice for any kind of design, web or otherwise, is contrast. Pink text on white or dark grey on black just don't work especially for people with impaired vision, and it is really amazing how many sites get this wrong with link colours that can hardly be seen on some of the backgrounds they are displayed on.
 
I find this quite interesting, and I wonder why that is. I'm a big fan of black and white pictures but I actually can't say why really.

As a hobbyist street style photographer, the reason why black and white colours have such an impact is because it not only transcends the feeling of timelessness and hides any defect in colour shots (for the most part), but also because B&W is also always consistent, while colour is not, unless editing is done in exactly the same way, and with exact same specs.
 
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