Understanding how colour influences and impacts your web design

Your web design can make or break your website. While a good site also includes other aspects like quality content and fast loading times, the design is the first thing users see. Thus, it serves as the basis for their first impression and affects what they decide to do on your site.
 
Given how influential your web design can be, you want to make sure you take your time laying out each element in your site. To achieve this, one of the most important design principles you need to consider is colour. Selecting the right colour scheme might seem like a trivial matter, but it can have a huge impact on how visitors perceive your site and what actions they take while browsing your site.

Colour Psychology in Web Design
 
Colour psychology studies and analyses how colours affect human behaviour. For example, red evokes powerful emotions as it is strong, eye-catching, and highly visible. You might notice that red is often used in restaurants--this is because the colour is known to stimulate appetite. 
 
Ultimately, understanding how colours trigger different emotional responses can help you decide which ones to use for your copy, links, CTA buttons, logos, landing pages, and the like. Naturally, you should still think of branding when designing your palette, but it helps to consider the principles of colour psychology to plan out where to put each colour. 

To help you out, here are some common colours used in web design, along with the emotions or objects they are associated with:

• Red - sense of urgency, power, passion
• Blue - intelligence, safety, calming, relaxing
• White - cleanliness, hygiene
• Black - elegance, glamour, modernity
• Yellow - optimism, warmth
• Green - environment, relaxing

 
When designing your colour palette, make sure you also consider the industry you work in and your target market. Knowing your customers and their behaviour is critical to knowing what type of design and colours will appeal to them. Much like other aspects of web design, colour is all about strategy, so you should do your research beforehand to know what will work best for your online business.
 
Link Between Colours and Conversions 
Scientific evidence shows that colours can be linked to conversions and influence a customer’s purchasing decisions. As surprising as it may sound, 62% to 90% of people evaluate a product within 90 seconds of seeing it, and the majority of their judgment is based on colour.
 
Given this finding, you can easily increase your conversions by using the right colours and putting them in the right areas. Some of the critical placements to consider would be headlines and CTA buttons as these can affect whether a user converts into a customer or not.
 
Overall, colours are a major design factor to think about when designing your website as they can influence how a customer perceives your brand. Based on how they respond to your choice of colours, they can easily form an opinion about your business and decide whether to continue learning about it or not!

If you are planning a website redesign, call to have a chat with our team about your colour preferences. 

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