How the Color of Your Site May Affect Your Visitors’ Mood
If you are not a designer then it may surprise you to find out that the most basic things, even the colour of your website can have a very strong impact on the mood of your visitors. The mood of your visitors can in turn have an impact on how they react to your website as a whole, and can either have a positive or negative impact on their decisions to interact with it for longer, recommend it to other people they know, or spend money in your online store. Because of this fact is very important to have a strong understanding of the various aspects of design, and how they should be used most in the most effective way, to create a website which performs well when seen by the targeted with user.
Specifically in regards to the colour of a website you need to have an understanding of what different colours can mean to different people. This is in many cases going to be different depending on what part of the world you are in because various cultures associate different meaning to different colours.
For example let’s look at the colour red. In Western society the colour red is commonly used in association with feelings of excitement, danger, love, passion, or stop signs. However in South Africa the colour red is associated with mourning over someone’s death, in China the colour red is symbolic of good luck or celebrations, and in Russia red is associated with communism.
Another example is something simple like using white as a feature colour in a design. Many western people associate the colour white with brides, angels, hospitals, doctors, and peace through the association of the white dove. However in Japan white is this the symbolic colour of death!
So even after these few examples you can see how important it is to have a strong understanding of the culture of the people you are targeting within your web design.
Further to this point, within the cultural realm that you are working in you will then also have to have a strong understanding of the kind of people within that culture that you are appealing to with your web design. Are you trying to attract corporate people, or blue-collar workers, young mothers, or teenagers. Depending on your target audience the colours used will almost certainly be different as will many other aspects within your designs.
Many people who do not have a design background will find this a difficult concept to understand, and it does take a long time to gain a full appreciation for the theory behind what is known as colour psychology. However once you have mastered these subtle design aspects, you will have the ability to design extremely powerful websites, which users find almost irresistible!
If you are having trouble with your own web design, or would like some free advice on anything relating to web design, please feel free to contact me via the link below.
