How important is your color scheme when creating a website? The answer is very important. The scheme or visual aspects of a website, including the color of that website is incredibly important in many ways.
Colors are associated with different meanings and influences, and they can instantly give a visitor information about what a website is about. At least in part.
Readability & User Experience
It’s also important to make a website easily readable. Especially if it’s a content website that’s predominantly text based.
The most common color combination for a content (text) website is, black text on a white background. It’s simply the best combination for readability, and generally the easiest on the eye and the most user friendly.
I have personally experimented a great deal on website color combinations, looking for something unique and different. However, my experiments almost always compromised the readability and user experience.
If a website is uncomfortable to read, or even irritable to the eyes, that will obviously affect the length of time a user spends on the website (user retention). User retention is an important factor in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and it could affect your website rankings. Plus, obviously the longer a user spends on your website the better.
Once you have a comfortable to read website, you still have a great deal of customization options. These include, secondary colors, layout, and a logo to create. Color choice can be very important in instantly giving a user unconscious information about what your website is about.
While you may be limited on the background and text color, you can still experiment with colors and designs to create an attractive and unique looking website.
Common Western World Color Associations
- Red – Physical Energy, Passion, Competitive
- Blue – Trust, Honest, Objective, Clear Thinking
- Green – Healthy, Natural, Nature
- Yellow – Fun, Vacation, Analytical
- Orange – Energetic, Adventure, Extroverted
- Purple – Mystical, Spiritual, Creative, Royalty
- Pink – Compassionate, Love, Romance, Sweet Foods
- Black – Professional, Mystery, Stylish
- White – Clean, Simplicity, New Beginnings, Futuristic
These are some of the most common associations for the most common colors. You can find out more about these colors, plus, others in the color pages at the top of this website.
Example Website Ideas & Color Choices
If you had a website on sports or fitness, red would be an obvious choice. Red is associated with physical energy. However, most bright colors like, orange, yellow, cyan or lime green/chartreuse would also be an appropriate choice, as these are high energy colors associated with physical activity.
If you had a website on health, natural or organic food, green would be a good selection to incorporate into the design. Green is automatically associated with healthy foods, freshness, and health in general.
If you had a website on vacation locations, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to incorporate yellow into the design. Yellow is associated with sun, summer, fun and vacations.
Summary
Your priority should be on user experience and comfort, maximizing and encouraging a user to remain on your website.
Website appearance, including color and logo design, is, of course, very important. However, it shouldn’t compromise the users’ experience.
It’s perhaps important to understand and be aware that colors do have different associations in different cultures.
