Colour plays a very important role while designing your website. It can impact your website visitor experience and your final return on investment. A website’s effectiveness as a sales tool can be greatly affected by simply changing its colours.

All of us are aware that it is more difficult to read text on a monitor than it is on paper, so we should be very careful while choosing the colours for a website. Some colour combinations are very hard on the eye, such as a yellow text on green background. The reason you see black text on a white background so often is that it is the easiest colour combination to read, both on and offline.
We need to realize that some colours evoke different emotions.
For instance:
- Green is often associated with freshness;
- White means purity; and
- Purple is associated with royalty
Colours also have both positive and negative associations.
Some common colour associations are listed below:
Red:
Positive: Sense of power, strength, action, passion, and love
Negative: Anger, forcefulness, danger, impatience, violence and revenge
Yellow:
Positive: Brightness, warmth and joy
Negative: Caution and warning
Blue:
Positive: Cool and tranquil, patience, comfort, loyalty and security
Negative: Fear, coldness, passivity and depression
Orange:
Positive: Warmth, friendliness and cheerfulness, excitement and energy
Negative: Ignorance
Green:
Positive: Nature, growth, freshness and soothing
Negative: Envy, greed, guilt and jealousy
Black:
Positive: Dramatic, sophisticated and stylish, serious
Negative: Evil and death
White:
Positive: Pure, fresh, easy, cleanliness or goodness
Negative: Blind, winter, cold, distant
A major goal in marketing is to evoke emotion in your audience. By choosing the colours for your website with care, you can evoke an emotional response that will increase sales.
As a general rule, one primary colour and two secondary colours should be chosen. These colors should be based on the specific target market you want to attract. If more than two or three colours are used websites tend to look chaotic, and the power of any one colour. The best advice is to keep it as simple as possible.
In designing your business website your color choice is vital. Be sure to try different colours, different shades, and different combinations before you make your final choice.
So the choice is yours whether you want your site to be one of the most visited website with a maximum return on investment.
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6 Responses to “Choosing The Right Colour For Your Website”
Good Post! I also believe color has major impact on emotion. This is a cool color picker I found, great for selecting website color combinations.
http://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html
Homer
January 9th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
[...] 4. Choice of Color Color has a significant effect on behavior. Choosing the right color palette for your website is incredibly important in establishing the proper mood, and displaying your product of service in the right light. There is a great deal of information available online today with regards to color psychology. A good start learning about color psychology is from our own blog. [...]
Top 5 Ways To Improve Website Conversion | Rise to the Top Blog
June 30th, 2008 at 12:05 am
A real eye opener. I firmly believe that colours do play an important role in deciding who will stay and who won’t stay back to learn more about your website. Very important to choose the right colour for your website, taking into consideration the niche, the geographical location as well.
July 14th, 2008 at 12:21 am
[...] all love tools that help make our lives easier. On an earlier blog post about color we had someone comment about a great color scheme tool. We recommend you have a [...]
Importance of Color Selection in Website Design | Rise to the Top Blog
February 23rd, 2009 at 11:51 am
We’re trying to figure out best colors for our flag site. Any suggestions? World Flags and Flags
Kevin
July 15th, 2009 at 3:52 am
Hey Kevin, I’d use the colour wheel here : http://gxi.co.za/building-your-brand/196-choosing-the-correct-colours-for-branding.html
September 4th, 2009 at 5:30 pm