Have you ever considered what colour your website is?
When it comes to website design, colours do much more than just make things look pretty. They play a crucial role in user experience, brand perception, and web accessibility. The right colour palette can transform how visitors perceive your site and, by extension, your brand.
Most people have an idea that different colours can evoke different emotions, e.g. red for anger or excitement, but in truth colour preferences are very dependent on personal experiences.
Colour Psychology in Website Design
Every colour has a story. Blue, for example, is often linked with trust and reliability, making it a favourite for financial institutions. Green evokes growth and health, often used by eco-friendly brands. Understanding colour psychology in web design is key to invoking the right emotional response from your audience.
Brand Consistency Across Platforms
Colour consistency is vital in reinforcing your brand identity. Whether it’s your website, social media, or offline materials, maintaining a consistent colour scheme ensures that your brand is easily recognisable and memorable. This visual identity plays a significant role in brand loyalty.
How to apply colours to your website
When designing websites, the best source of inspiration for design and colours is the organisation’s logo. Most logos consist of one or two colours so that is always a good place to start when deciding your website’s main colours.
Good use of colours on your website will make it more engaging with visitors to your site. If you don’t engage with a website visitor within 5 seconds, the chances are they’ll move on, and good use of attractive colours can help with grabbing people’s attention.
Clever use of colours can also make text easy to read and help key areas to stand out.
Areas to consider when using colours :
- click through links
- menu bars
- footer section (the bottom of each page)
- the text itself
- page backgrounds
Which colours will work best on your site?
When considering which colours to focus on it’s worth considering who your target customer is. Here are some general thoughts from the world of marketing on colours and how they can apply to different demographics :
- Women tend to prefer blue, purple and green
- Men tend to prefer blue, green and black
- Blue is good for building trust
- Yellow is used for warnings as well as for optimism
- Green is great for calls to action as well as conveying peacefulness
- Orange is a fun or sociable colour and is linked to confidence
- Black implies luxury and high-value products
- Grey portrays balance and calm
- Purple is linked to creativity and imagination
- Silver represents professionalism and affordability; that’s what we think anyway!
- White is great to help websites breathe – i.e. use lots of it between sections
If you have any questions about this or other aspects of web design, do get in touch.