The Psychology of colour in marketing has a long history. From MacDonald’s, “Make you feel Hungry”, red and yellow, to Pepsi’s, “All American you-can-trust-us for a good time”, colour and logo design, everybody is making choices every day based on colour and perception in marketing design.
Web design for a small business is no exception. Studies have shown that not only the site structure but also the colour and combination of patterns and colour affect consumer behaviour.
As a small business website owner, it pays to know how your web design colours impact your audience.
Do Colours Affect website Conversions and Sales?
How much thought do you put into your small business web design? You spend time planning the pages, the categories and the keywords. Then comes the difficult task of putting the colour in. How do you decide what is best for your industry or niche?
Colour does impact conversion, sales, time on page and much more.
When choosing the colours for your website logo and design, you need to keep your visitors in mind as well as the type of business you are conducting.
Some colour themes are obvious. Red and Yellow create an appetite. Green is one of the most trustworthy colours and is used by those in the health and environmental fields.
Black represents sophistication and elegance. Use the chart below as a guide to how your website visitors might perceive your colours.
Website Colours Associated With Trust
Is all your online effort believable? You can write till the cows come home and you can make all the wild claims and tremendous promises in the world, but your colours speak louder than words.
The significance of a colour can also change according to specific other associations. For example, yellow is considered the happiest colour in the spectrum. It’s also typical of shonky used car dealers and cheap store sales.
Thanks to http://www.joehallock.com/edu/COM498/associations.html for this research.
Your small business web design and eCommerce store is communicating something. Not only with language, but with colours, position, style and fonts. We all have cultural as well as natural associations with various colours and we all have fonts that are representative of those cultures.
Take the time to look at the most effective free fonts you can include in your design to build unique brand awareness. Avoid using multiple fonts where it is not warranted as these can interrupt the user experience. Aim for clean, clear and consistent font use.
This is true for all of the design elements on your site, including logo. branding, product images, calls-to-action and more.
One way to experiment with the colour set you are interested in is to use a colour tool like Logojoy’s logo design tool. Using an online tool to develop logo and branding concepts allows you to experiment with logo colour ideas.
Moving on…
Horizontal lines tend to depict stability while vertical lines tend to evoke masculinity, strength and dynamism.
Red has a temper, is reactive and spontaneous. Got the Picture? For some nice colour combination experiments, try the ColorCombo site.
Dig Deeper: Check out this infographic on the psychological impact of colour in website conversions by Design Advisor.
Tips on Choosing Colours for Your Website
For most websites, minimal colour is best. Two or Three Colours is plenty. Remember, you want your website calls to action to stand out so:
- Only use one colour for buttons and clickable media
- Keep the colour scheme consistent. Headings that are blue today should be blue tomorrow
- Maintain plenty of white space (or, for a darker site, empty space)
Consider your Target Audience in Terms of:
- Gender
- Age
- Interests
And consider which Colours are most naturally associated with your product or service.
As a general rule, most designers begin with the 60 | 30 | 10 rule which is often used by interior designers and those in the fashion industry.
The idea is to choose three colours and use them in that ratio.
- The 60% will be the main colour of your landing page, blog or website. It’s going to be the colour that all the other colours dance around
- The 30% needs to be in stark contrast to the main theme colour.
- It’s going to be used for things like buttons and calls to action to contrast with the 60% to create a visually striking effect.
- The final 10% is your ‘accent colour’, which should complement either your primary or secondary colour.
In conventional design wisdom, it’s safer to make either the 60% or 30% a ‘neutral’ colour (white, grey, beige, black and so on). This gives you the maximum number of options when choosing your other two colours, because neutral elements will generally go with anything.
Some directories have default descriptions for particular categories. If you have a great product that somehow never seems to get the attention that it deserves, it may be that by creating a landing page and a campaign to drive traffic to that page is all you require, rather than a full website build and optimisation of every page on the website. Ranking for keywords isn’t an easy task, especially if the word you’re looking for is competitive.
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Excellent post.
A really helpful Post. Do you think you will be able to stand on this with additional tactics on web design? I was especially thinking of web building and web design for smaller Industries and trades.
Hi Martha, take a look at this one which addresses those kinds of businesses and especially the benefits of an optimised mobile responsive website design.
https://www.malleeblue.com/8-strategies-for-designing-a-small-business-website-in-a-mobile-world/
Thanks for your article on conversion and web design. Is there a way of contacting you to discuss the plans we have for our site?
Hi Joanne, thanks for your comment. By all means, get in touch with us via our contact form or contact us or the phone number at the bottom of this page and I’ll be glad to help you further.
Glad I stumbled upon your article. Are these conversion tactics specific to WordPress or do you think they would work equally on Magento or Prestashop?
Hello just wanted to give you a quick heads up thank you for your article. Your design ideas are great and I’m looking forward to putting them to the test.
Thanks for these hugely beneficial tips on conversion and web design. I’m getting ready to implement some of them today.
I am impressed by the ideas you offer here. Thanks for the strategies and recommendations.