Just imagine a world without Colors – how boring it would be!! The same principle applies to websites without colors too. Colors always exert prodigious sway over the attitudes and emotions of humans. They’re mood-setters that can articulate the intended message of your website without words to the visitors. Rather than the direct impact that colors make on your website’s overall appearance, they can compliment or even define the type of statements that you wish to convey through your website’s design. Picking a good color scheme for your website seems to be scary – especially if your confidence in your color coordination ability is a bit low, or if you probably have a feeling that you’re not an adept designer. In fact, choosing the perfect chromatic palette for your website is a tricky game that could give your website either a harmonious look or a dark scene straight out of a horror film! There are lots of factors that you need to take into account while choosing the color schemes for your website. Here, we’re gonna look into some simple and practical ways that’ll help to single out the right colors for your website.

 Color Your Brand Too!

When we ask you to think of Coca-Cola, what’s the very first thing that comes into your mind? It might be probably, an ice-cold bottle of Coke and an image of the iconic red Coke logo, right..? Well, for us, it’s pretty hard to think of the Coke bottle without any sort of red color on it – which means, the color ‘red’ has that much been a part of Coke, just as its very famous soda! Every color is attached to different emotions. For example, when we see the color red, it triggers the emotional responses like excitement, boldness, love, and passion in us. And by adding red color to their logo, these are the precise feelings that the Coke crew wants you to associate with it.

When you’re comparing color options, keep this in mind – it’s not just about the color of the font or how it matches the color of the buttons. The colors that are conspicuous on your website should more generally reflect your brand identity, as how the red color reflects the Coke. You won’t use one logo for your website and another logo for your package design, right? Apply the same theory with colors – be consistent with the way you look out and work with colors that you believe will really represents you and your brand’s vision.

 Blend with Care

Color is like a magic; defining a website’s color palette requires some mix and matching, but you can’t simply put the colors based on a whim, just like a mad scientist! Color combinations are measured by how the colors complement each other. Using a color wheel and applying the simple color psychology can help you create successful combinations based on the amazing relationship that exist between primary, secondary, and tertiary colors. As we’ve already mentioned, all the colors are closely linked with a specific mood or feeling, which means your website visitors are already ‘programmed’ to recognize red with passion, relate cleanliness with white backgrounds, differentiate between cold and warm colors etc. To make this work better in your favor, you have to identify the mindset of your targeted audience and then find the right palette to support it. The below mentioned is an informative introduction into color psychology that any web designer could benefit from:

• RED : It denotes love, passion, excitement, energy, and power; it also implicates aggression, as well as danger.
• BLUE : It’s the color of freedom, coolness, patience, loyalty, peace, trustworthiness, and spirituality; it can also symbolize sadness and depression.
• GREEN: The color of life, naturalness, health, wealth, prosperity and restfulness; in certain contexts, it shows decay and toxicity.
• YELLOW: It represents light, happiness, brightness, optimism and joy.
• ORANGE: The color that perfectly typify friendliness, approachability, warmth, playfulness and courage.
• BROWN : The color that stand for comfort, credibility strength and stability.
• VIOLET: The color that epitomize wisdom, sophistication and celebration.
• GRAY: Security, maturity and reliability can be well illustrated using gray.
• PINK: In general, pink color is considered as a feminine color. It also indicates sweetness, childhood, and fun.
• WHITE : The ultimate symbol of purity, youth, freshness, peace and cleanliness.
• BLACK: It shows power, secrecy, mystery and elegance.

We know, not many of you possess a color wheel, but that shouldn’t be a problem. With online tools like Adobe Kuler or Paletton  you can create classy color combinations.

While Choosing a Color….

From the above mentioned description, you can see that a single color holds variable meanings. Yes, the meanings of colors may vary according to different regions and cultures. For example, the way a person from India perceives a certain color may not be the same as that of someone from Japan or US.  So, while you’re in a planning stage for a website, try to understand who your target audience is and how that particular group’s culture views color associations.

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How Many Colors Shall I Use?

Even though there’s no hard and fast rule for the number of colors that you may use for designing your website, the more colors you use, the harder it becomes to establish a unified design. Let’s borrow the 60-30-10 rule from interior design, which states that it’s better to use 3 colors in varying degrees i.e., 60%, 30%, and 10%, to create the absolute harmony in your design. This means that the primary color should specify overall unifying theme of the design covering around 60% of the entire site space. The 30% color should stay in contrast with the 60% color to create a visually striking effect. The rest is to do with the 10%, which is known as the ‘accent color’, which should complement either your primary or secondary color.

 Don’t Neglect Any Practical Situations

Do you think that the task of web design in an web development company ends up with making sites look good? The answer is a doubtless “NO”. All good designs should support smooth and easy browsing, and beyond aesthetic considerations, your choice of colors plays a significant role in determining a site’s usability. Here is rest of the things that you should take into account while dealing with colors:

• All of the texts on your website must be in a readable format. If your background color and text color don’t match well, visitors will find a hard time reading your content. Don’t give a chance for that.
• Color-blind visitors or visually-impaired ones benefit greatly from high color contrasts. For those people, make Call to Actions, buttons and other clickable items much clearer using proper colors.

 The Best Color for Your Call-To-Action…

Although, there is no clear-cut answer to this concern, red, orange, and green are found to be more predominantly used for call-to-action buttons on the websites. Different brands follow different strategies for the same, like how the Amazon team shows that orange can be used effectively as a call-to-action color. If you look at the website of Amazon, you’ll notice all of their most important call-to-actions are put in orange, which is an excellent choice for a company that wants to come off as approachable as possible.

By now, you should be thinking, “Why aren’t more people using the magic of colors to their advantage?” Because most people don’t know how! Deciding the optimum colors for websites is one of the most difficult tasks that arise in spite of the apparent easiness. However, choosing the perfect chromatic palette for your website is quite important for productively communicating the intended message, strengthening the idea of a unique entity and to create brand awareness among the visitors.

So finally, the bottom line is – use the right colors, and then, you win!!