Considering Colors

When designing your website, you need to carefully consider your color choices. That’s because site visitors form their opinions about your site within nine seconds of first seeing the page. Your colors give some of the first visual clues as to the site’s content, importance, and navigation. Used wisely, colors group similar ideas together, express the values and personality of the website, and enhance any goods or services the website offers to consumers.
Some web designers like using five colors: three complementary colors, one contrast color, and one highlight color. Others focus on color theory, since whether your website visitors know it or not they have instinctive reactions to most colors in either a positive or negative way. For instance:

• Red: Evokes feelings of passion, excitement, and energy; can also be associated with anger, blood, or violence.
• Orange: Represents approachability, informality, friendliness; can also indicate a lack of discernment or quality
• Yellow: Associated with sunlight, yellow is upbeat and optimistic; can sometimes be overwhelming
• Green: Nature, life, stability, and in many cultures money and wealth as well; can indicate artificiality, decay, and toxicity in other contexts.
• Blue: Elegant, calm, spiritual, and soothing, although in a negative context it can imply sadness or passiveness.
• Purple: Playful, impulsive, royalty, and dreams; can also be used to indicate nightmares or madness

You also need to carefully consider your audience, since certain colors appeal to center genders, age groups, and cultures more than others. For example, men tend to prefer red and orange while women gravitate towards blue and yellow. Younger audiences like hot, vibrant colors while the elderly typically prefer more muted, sober tones. Finally, not all colors mean the same thing across cultures. Green may indicate money in the U.S., but in China a green hat is a sign that a man’s wife is cheating on him.