The psychology of colour: how your web design can influence your customers
When we first entered into 2015, the web was awash with articles on the best web design trends for 2015. It seemed that simplicity was in, and attention-grabbing standfirsts were out, while professional photography was one of the hottest new trends to make our websites stand out.
One thing that was overlooked, and often continues to be today, is website colour schemes. It seems like something so simple and yet many first time website builders end up putting something together which could potentially tick all the other boxes but be painful on the eye. With this in mind, then, there are certain colours which could be more effective for your potential customers than others – here are a few which have proven to be successful in the past.
Primary colours enable calls to action
We’ve all heard that red can heighten our emotions, but it can certainly do a lot more than that, and this is why it’s so often used for fonts on websites encouraging calls to action. Take, for example, the text and surrounding colours at www.rubyfortune.com – as a site which promotes special offers via its online gaming, it requires calls to action such as ‘play now!’ The burgundy shades help to draw the reader’s eye to these call to actions, and ultimately, encourage more interaction and bigger profits for the webhost.
Yellow spells danger!
Though road signs might tell us to keep an eye out for red as a warning sign, psychological studies have shown that many of us commonly associate yellow with danger. While many designers use yellow to encourage a playful approach, be sparing with this, as many of our mental associations are rooted in the natural instinct to react to yellow, so perhaps use this for drawing the user’s eye to important messages. The Think! safe driving campaign website had a very liberal use of Yellow.
Blue establishes trust
In January this year the media was awash with stories about Facebook’s new privacy policy, which in turn didn’t exactly give the site great press as people became wary of being spied upon by the social networking site. For this reason, trust is a huge issue for Facebook, and it is one of the many reasons why it uses the colour blue to entice its users. Encouraging feelings of peace and calm, blue is also favoured by PayPal and many credit card websites, promoting feelings of tranquillity and planning, rather than perhaps the spontaneous, call-to-action nature of red.
