Today I wanted to hit on website color schemes, sometimes a difficult subject for clients. The main purpose of a color scheme isn’t necessarily to make your website better looking (although it usually doesn’t hurt), but actually to assist your website in accomplishing its main goals! Different colors have different preconceived meanings attached to them; and those differ depending on your audience. So, our primary step is to establish our target audience, more specifically, our target geographic region since color meanings differ the most between countries (did you know the color white in Japan is associated with death?).
For our purposes, we’ll pretend your audience is strictly within the United States. The next step then is to think about what the main goal of your website is and how the colors will help reflect the attitude your website needs to achieve its goals. Here are some examples of associations:
- Saturated colors are good for youth related items, and semi-saturated for fun, exhilarating, etc.
- Pastel colors signify peace, relaxation, etc.
- Dark colors can be good for evil, secret, technological, etc.
You also have some specific colors with some overall associations. Not to say they’re specific to these in particular, but they work well for what they’re paired with:
- Royal/Dark Blue is typically associated with corporate.
- Red associated with extreme
- White associated with large/enterprise
- Green associated with eccentric
These are just some examples. To find more, visit popular websites and see what they’re using to influence the vibe of their visitors. Influcing a vibe can be very helpful in raising conversions and accomplishing goals so when you’re thinking about your next color scheme for your website, be sure to put some extra thought and research into it instead of just going with your favorite color (pink).
