Although probably not something that we regularly think about, we’re constantly surrounded by and inundated by color. Color is all around us and, consciously or subconsciously, color continually affects our perceptions and how we interpret the world around us. It also affects our feelings and our moods and can stimulate our senses.
When it comes to your website, the color palette can affect not only how your brand is perceived, but also the conversion rate of your website. The colors you use in your web design can be important factors that add to the success of your site.
Color Palettes and Web Design
When starting a new website design or re-designing an existing website, color selection should be first and foremost … after all, color will play a key role in the overall design. More than simply selecting colors that you personally like, you need to understand the psychological perceptions that color can have and then delve deeper into how particular color schemes affect your target audience.
Analyzing your target audience and knowing how they perceive and react to particular colors is also important. For example, men and women often have different reactions to colors. Older people also tend to react differently to particular colors than young people. And, people from different countries and cultures will often have different reactions to different colors.
Different cultures can have different reactions to individual colors, but in the Western Hemisphere, general color perceptions often include:
- Red: strength, passion, power, excitement, boldness, determination, desire, courage, warning.
- Yellow: playfulness, wisdom, warmth, happiness, comfort, energy.
- Orange: creativity, warmth, vibrancy, enthusiasm, adventurousness.
- Green: nature, prosperity, nurturing, harmony, life, newness.
- Blue: trustworthiness, reliability, loyalty, integrity, sadness.
- Purple: royalty, spirituality, imagination, luxury, elegance, maturity.
- Pink: femininity, softness, health.
- Brown: earth, stability, balance, nature.
- White: purity, cleanliness, innocence, simplicity, virtue.
- Black: authority, sophistication, formality, death.
When designing a website, it is important to research your audience to better understand how the colors you use in your web design might affect how they perceive your brand and how they might act on your website. Color can affect web conversion rates as well as overall perception…. selecting the right color scheme for your web design and layout it important!
