Choosing the right colors for your website is just as important as selecting graphics and content. Colors have many effects on people. Certain colors can invoke specific emotions in people. Emotional reactions can affect the image of your company in the visitors mind and can have a major effect on your company’s brand.

When choosing colors for your web site, there are three main areas that should be addressed.

The psychological effect of colors, the effect on the readability of your site, the complementary choice of colors for your background, graphics, links, and text.

People do associate colors with specific moods. Scientific texts have proven that different colors can make people happy, sad, relaxed, excited, angry or afraid. Anything that can evoke those responses in people needs to be looked at carefully when designing your website. Colors tend to be classified as “neutral, “warm” or “cool”.

Neutral Colors: Whites –Grays –Browns – Blacks
Warm Colors: Reds - Yellows –Oranges –Pinks.
Cool Colors: Blue –Green –Purple

Web Safe Colors: Vacuum tubes, LCD and Plasma screens all display colors differently. There are 216 colors that can be displayed on every type of monitor in every web browser and will look almost identical. These 216 are called web safe colors. If consistent color is important, you should only use web safe colors on your websites.  

Listed below are a few characteristics of color that should always be considered when designing your graphics. 

Colors have an effect on our emotions within 90 seconds of viewing. Color choices can motivate, impress, and persuade your prospect to buy from you. Colors not only intensify the item, they greatly influence our behavior. The effects of color differ among different cultures. Color choices alone are sending a specific message to your viewers.

Color Schemes:

Single Color: Single color schemes use several different shades and intensities of a single color on a white background. For example, if you want to use a red color scheme, you can use everything from the lightest pink to a red so dark it is almost black.

Complementary Colors: Complementary color schemes use two or more colors that look good together and create a pleasant blend that is appealing to most people. One color may be dominant and the other used to compliment it.

Contrasting Colors: Contrasting color schemes use two or more dominant colors to create an “eye grabbing effect”. For example, using a dark blue page background, a deep red frame around a white background text area with black text is a typical contrasting color scheme.

General guidelines for selecting the right colors: Text should be readable. Use attractive and pleasing colors. Select the colors that portray the image you want to give your visitors. For consistent colors across different browsers, use web safe colors. Do not use a normal color intensity images as a background behind text. It makes it difficult to read. If you use an image, use it as a faded watermark. Colors should be uniform on all your web pages to create a “brand” for your site and let your visitors know they are still on your website.

When you come to designing your website, choose you color scheme just as carefully as you choose your graphics and content. Whenever you begin to choose your colors, think about your target market. Give some thought to the current emotion of your prospect and to the message you want to send. Then choose your colors.