Choosing the right colour to offset your web design

You’ve just finished writing the content for your webpage. Your choice of words are amazing…your imagery beautiful… all you have got left to do is add colour to the background and graphic design. Sounds simple, but colour can have a profound impact upon the success of your webpage. If you pick the wrong colours it can deter your customers away to another website.

This is easy to rectify. All you need to ask yourself is: what impressions do you want to give?

• Modern: use clean bright colours such as blue and yellow
• Welcoming or cosy: adopt oranges, yellows and greens
• Corporate: keep your colours clean. Keep to a mixture of blues, greys/grays and white
• Fun: if your site is aimed at kids include the primary colours of red, blue and yellow.

These are just to name a few of your possible choices.

For many of us, our website cannot be placed under one classification. We build them using a mixture of themes to broaden their appeal.

To overcome this obstacle, by acquiring a general knowledge and understanding of colour psychology you can make a real difference to your website.

Colour
Positive symbolism
Negative symbolism
Red
Passion, love, heat, danger
Too much can be seen as aggressive and bloody. Red can also create issues for Colour-blind sufferers
Pink
Femininity and youth
Naivety and weakness
Orange
Vibrant, warm and autumnal
Attention seeking
Yellow
Sunshine, happiness, growth and newness
Dishonesty, cowardice, betrayal and illness
Green
Nature, life, growth, good luck, youth, spring
Jealousy, envy and misfortune
- Similar to red, colour-blindness sufferers swap the 2 shades around
Blue
Calm, peaceful, water, harmony, trust, confidence, loyalty; gives energy
Sadness, coldness, depression
Purple
Royalty, spirituality, passion and love
Cruelty, arrogance and mourning
Brown
Neutral, earthy, outdoors and warm
Dirty and dull
Grey
Can be modern, intelligent, solid and clean
Old age, sadness, boring and dull
White
Cleanliness, innocence, space, purity, simplicity, peace, snow and goodness
Death (in Eastern cultures), cold and sterile
Black
Power, elegance, magic, mystery, night, sophistication and solid
Death, witches, fear, evil, anonymity, unhappiness, sadness, remorse, anger and mourning

Colour combinations

Certain colours will work better within your graphic design than others. You just need to experiment. To give you a helping hand, try incorporating these colours into your web design and layout:

1. Black, white, grey/gray and red
2. red and white
3. orange and purple
4. purple and yellow
5. green and purple
6. blue and yellow
7. blue, grey/gray and white
8. green and browns
9. teal and purple/lilac

Using the right colour scheme can make a real difference to the perception of your web design, but it is easy to resolve. By following these few simple tips - you can increase the number of visitors to your website and get the conversions you want.

For more complicated professional designs, Web design agency and digital media firms can help you translate your ideas, product or company onto the internet fast and effectively

Frank Woodford has been a copywriter for many years gaining valuable experience in the market. Currently he working alongside a digital media firms and web design agency.