Web design is a lot more complicated than it’s led on to be. Consumers rarely think about the amount of time, planning, preparation, brainstorming, organizing, and money that goes into making a website functional and available to serve it’s purpose. The work doesn’t stop there. Websites are constantly being changed, updated and revamped in order to better serve the customer and in order to better serve the business itself.
Everybody is in the game to win it. For the business person, to win means to sell as much product as possible. For the consumer, to win is to get a good deal on as much product as possible. Both sides of the party have to do their best to strategize so that the ball is in their court.
More often, it’s the business that wins, as they’re the ones providing the product, and they’re the ones putting out the deals in order to draw people in. In the end, everybody gets what they want, so consumerism is good for an economy.
As mentioned before, the game is not always easy to play. A business must strategize to win the game. One way to strategize is to use color to your advantage. Here are tips for how to choose what colors to use on your website. It matters more than you may know.
Three is A Great Number
Too much color on a site will overwhelm a user. It’s a cardinal rule to choose three colors and use them throughout the design of your entire website. It’s okay to use maybe 5 or 6 colors, but if you can, limit it to three. This way, the user isn’t using all their brain power separating information and color code on your site.
Virtru is a great example of this. Their main color is a shade of blue of vibrant sky blue and they counteract the blue with easy to read white text and the important links are surrounded in black to draw attention.
Avoid Colors in the Colorblindness Scale
If you color coordinate your site with important colors to highlight links so that they’re easier to see and follow, it won’t do you any good if you use colors that part of the population can’t even see. This equation can get rather complicated because there are different levels of colorblindness, so do a little research to see which colors are safe to use depending on the goal you want to achieve.
Use Color Meanings to Portray Your Intentions
Colors are associated with feelings. Green is for life and things like health and wealth, red is for anger, passion and excitement, blue is for freedom, peace, loyalty and the like. Depending on what your site is promoting, you’ll want to use the appropriate color scale.
For example, if you’re a chiropractor, you’ll probably want to use colors like green, brown, white and blue. You definitely don’t want to invoke the feeling of anxiety that red portrays, or romance that pink portrays in this situation.