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 the 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.
Why Hire a Web Designer to Improve Your Website
When it comes to creating the best website with the right combination of colours, it involves considering your company colours, target audience, and your online goals. The best person who can help you achieve your website goals is a professional web designer. Hence, choosing one of the best web designers will surely bring tons of benefits for your website.
Here are the tasks and benefits of hiring the best web designer to improve the colour and overall look and functionality of your website:
Creating the Right Emotions Through Color: A web designer can use colour to create emotions you want to drive for your website. Each colour reflects specific moods.
For instance, brighter warm colors, like red, orange, and yellow increase alertness and energize an online user, making your target audience happy and cheerful.
On the other hand, darker cool shades, such as green, blue, and purple promote relaxation and tranquility.
So, if you have a website for your spa and wellness center, your web designer will likely play around darker cool shades to draw more people to your website, as they’ll find it very relaxing to look at.
Collaborating All Web Elements: A professional web designer has the right tools, knowledge, skills, and experience to collaborate with all the web elements and color.
It helps create a perfect combination of web layout, font, colors, spacing, negative space, call-to-action-buttons, category or menu placement, and other web elements to create the best website that matches your business and your target audience.
Refine Finishing: If you have an existing website, a web designer can still improve the color, layout, speed, and other web elements. A web designer can refine minute detail to ensure that you’ll gain more traffic, conversions, leads, and sales, so you can achieve your web presence and business goals.
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.
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?
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?