The Use Of Color On Your Webpages

The Use Of Color On Your Webpages
The Psychological Meaning Of Color

I have been asked by a few people to explain the psychological meaning of color and how it affects what you should be for your website from a marketing perspective.

The internet is the ultimate visual and psychological medium. It provides businesses with an unparalleled avenue to reach potential customers likie no other medium in the world. In this visually entrancing world it is the copy, or words, on your website that have the greatest psychological impact on visitors and given this they become your most important communication and sales tool.

Another important psychological aspect of your website is the often over looked and definitely misunderstood marketing strategy of colors. The same as we use words and phrases to describe and express our intentions color can be used to convey similar messages in more subtle and concealed ways. As an example of a color being used to convey a feeling, when I was at University they painted the walls in the library a light pastel-pink color to try and enhance the studying environment. Did it work? I really don’t know, I was in the computer lab, but I am guessing that subliminally there was probably some impact whether it be physically measurable or not.

In the past choosing color schemes for websites used to be left up to the programmer who was responsible for just getting something up and running. Often there was no forethought or planning for real graphic design or image perception. "A simple site, nothing fancy". If you really want to succeed online then this kind of website will just not work.
Given the competitive nature of the Internet market, there's been a steady flood of Internet marketing pros who are looking to stamp their mark on the ever increasingly competitive keyword monopoly game. Every day there businesses employ Internet marketing agencies to utilize their expert marketing strategies for their business. There are usually huge fees attached to this employment!

One area that is quite often getting missed during these expensive website makeovers is the psychology of color. It's important to address this marketing issue in design and ensure it the colors chosen are enhancing and supporting the overall theme and feel of the website in an effort to get the website visitor to perform the action we actually want them to do on our website; be it contact us on email, buy a product or feel comfortable browsing our articles and reading the news.

So what colors should we be incorporating into our website designs to ensure we convey the right message to our visitors? Below is a detailed list of colors and their associated meanings (feelings) and keywords, so you can get an idea of what to put on your webpages depending on your products or services.

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RED is associated with love, passion, danger, warning, excitement, food, impulse, action, adventure.

BLUE is associated with trustworthiness, success, seriousness, calmness, power, professionalism.

GREEN is associated with money, nature, animals, health, healing, life, harmony.

ORANGE is associated with comfort, creativity, celebration, fun, youth, affordability.

PURPLE is associated with royalty, justice, ambiguity, uncertainty, luxury, fantasy, dreams.

WHITE is associated with innocence, purity, cleanliness, simplicity.

YELLOW is associated with curiosity, playfulness, cheerfulness, amusement.

PINK is associated with softness, sweetness, innocence, youthfulness, tenderness.

BROWN is associated with earth, nature, tribal, primitive, simplicity.

GREY is associated with neutralality, indifference, reserved.

BLACK is associated with seriousness, darkness, mystery, secrecy.

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When choosing colors for your site it's important to apply an contrasting or sympathetic and complementary color schemes. It's important to identify your market and ensure the psychological message you're trying to get across with the rest of your site design, words and images are complemented and enhanced by the appropriate color scheme. If you're still insure as to what colors you should use to get the best results, you can do a test by running samples of the same site with slightly differing color schemes past a test audience and see which has the best impact or you can even run differing colored sites to visitors and track conversions.In the end, t's up to you how to try and test or track the impact of the color message your sending out to the visitors of you site(s).

The information above is intended as a guide and in no way implies that these colors are seen and/or mean the same things to all people. The list above has been researched and studied by many, and this is the complied result of those studies.

I hope you find this helpful in you website design adventures!

To Our Online Success!
Ruth...aka "Wealthymaker"