If you are a website owner or a designer, one thing you should be specific about is choosing the best color scheme to make your site a welcoming experience to the users. Colors play an important role in web design, more than you may realize. They set the mood when the user first arrives at the site. Colors are the first thing they consciously or subconsciously notice before taking in the other elements. Even if you create a stunning and fully functioning layout, your efforts will go in vain if the colors do fail to complement the same.
2017 will bring a lot of competition for e-commerce and other websites. Since every business is trying to build the best site to grab the most attention, you should not lag behind in the race. It has become more important for businesses and individuals to focus on the details of the websites to stay ahead. That is why selecting appropriate colors is crucial in terms of web design, especially for the business websites. There are many factors to consider while choosing the best color scheme for particular sites. Let us explore some of them.
Questions you should ask
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While planning the color schemes for your site, some initial questions to ask yourself are:
- What colors should I use for the headline and logo?
- Do I know how to pick the complementary colors?
- Which parts of the website should I leave plain without colors?
Deciding on the combinations and mixing colors can be tricky. The result of your color mixing should look harmonious, and not like a horror film scene. If you avoid any colors, your pages may look dull and uninspiring. On the other hand, if you use too much of colors, users may find it tacky. Therefore, you need to aim at bringing a balance using too little or too many colors.
This task becomes more difficult if you do not have a natural sense of colors and combination as a DIY site owner using any of the CMS systems for development. If you are lagging behind on this, always keep these golden rules in mind.
- Identify the suitable dominant color for your site in line with your brand statement.
- Adequately combine the complementary colors to build a perfect scheme.
- Keep an eye on the background color to go well with the foreground.
- Put the right colors at the right place on your pages like a pro.
Expert advice on website colors
Let’s take a look at some expert advice that you can rely on while attempting web designing.
1.Remember you are coloring your brand, not just the site
When considering website colors, you have to always keep the bigger picture in mind. It is not merely about matching the color of the text or borders with the button colors. The prominent colors you use on the website should also resemble your brand identity.
Think about it this way. You are not going to use different looking logos for products and the site, are you? It is the same theory applicable to colors too. Be unique and consistent with your brand colors across various platforms. This will create a unique brand identity in the mind of the target audience.
2.Do careful mix and match
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While using website design packages to develop your business sites, remember that defining a good color palette will always require a compelling mix and match. However, do not do it like a mad scientist, but have a more simplistic approach towards it with an excellent sense of effective combinations.
The effectiveness of color combination is measured by how the colors complement each other. Having a basic understanding of the color wheel and the color theory will help you to create some great combinations based on a rational relationship between the primary, secondary, and tertiary colors. If you are not familiar with the color wheel and theories, try online tools such as Adobe Kuler or Paletton, which can help you create some of the best color combinations.
3.Tackle the practical issues
Web design is not just about making the web pages look good. A good website should also support smooth browsing, and colors do play a role in determining the user-friendliness of a website. So, beyond just aesthetic priority, your choice of colors must also contribute to a smooth browsing experience for the users. Some tips are:
- Ensure that the text and background colors provide easy readability for people of all ages.
- The color-blind or visually-impaired users will benefit largely from higher grade color contrasts.
- Navigation buttons, call to action, and other clickable areas should be made more noticeable with bright and compelling colors.
4.Explore color psychology
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It is worth knowing that many of the common colors have close links to particular moods and feelings. With their daily practice, many of the human visitors browsing through your site may be already preoccupied to interpret red for passion, distinguish cold and warm colors, or to identify cleanliness with pure white.
To make this psychology work for you, try to do a little bit of research to identify what different colors imply and how people tend to interpret colors. It will help to determine the right palette for your website. You can refer a handy guide on color psychology to have an in-depth understanding of how you can benefit from it.
5.Keep the cultural context in mind
Colors operate differently on the basis of the cultural context in different regions and communities. For example, some societies consider white to symbolize purity, whereas other communities see white as a color of mourning. Some shades are considered to be sacred by some religions as green to the Muslims. So, while designing a business website, you need to keep the specific target group in mind to define colors based on their cultural context.
Ideally, you can choose a single color or a two-color combination that matches your brand image as the dominant color on the website. Next, decide which one or two accent colors you want to use for creating an ideal color scheme. After building the basic elements, you need to decide which color to keep as the background of web pages to complete your design.
