How to Choose Color For Website Design

It’s known that only a few moments are enough for people to form an opinion about any object, and your website is no exception. Users will have about 50 milliseconds (this is 0.05 seconds) to understand: whether they like it or not. That’s why their first impression should be perfect. How you can control that? Of course, with your website design. Let’s start with colors.

One of the most effective marketing tools is website color coordination. Using colors in web design properly, you can form a necessary attitude to your product, cause optimistic emotions and brand trust. Before customers decide to make a purchase, they decide to stay or leave. And you can help them in this way. Choosing website colors and implementing them, you need do that correctly. If your task is to attract new customers and increase your conversion, of course.

Step 1: Your target audience

Picking style for website, you should think about your prospects and repeated customers. How old are they? What about occupation, interests, preferences? Imagine that you sell new car brands for wealthy men who are about 35. Do these men love pink? Would they take your rosy website seriously?

Speaking generally about color solutions, it’s better to rely on the following recommendations:

websites with goods for children look good with bright, contrasting and positive colors;
picking colors for website for girls and women, bet on gentle and bright ones;
if your target customers are men, prefer dark or neutral colors.

Such rules make sense not only for a specific target audience, but also to the general. Why are you creating website? What is it about? If you need to design a news portal, it will look pretty different in comparison with a new social media. We have some ideas for you:

Neutral colors: black, white, gray are the best option for the news portals. Their users pay more attention to content, so the color variety here is minimized.
Corporate business websites follow the same tendency. Companies prefer strict, business design with neutral, calm colors. Sometimes designers dilute the overall rigor with vivid accents to highlight the most important information, to call the visitor to action.
Creating forum or social network, you should think about the comfort of visitors, intuitive interface. Therefore, the design is rarely colorful, usually no more than two or three colors are used here.
E-commerce stores often get spectacular designs. It is necessary to ensure that bright elements match the products offered on the site. Decorated such a website juicy and you’ll succeed.
Landings are designed specifically to attract attention to a product or offer. Their content is usually quite short and capacious, and the design comes to the fore. That’s why such a resource must be beautiful, with perfect colour combination. But, of course, everything in moderation.

You shouldn’t rely on stereotypes only, each aspect needs to be thought out. If your target audience consists of both men and women (e.g., you’re selling FMCG), it would be the best choice to rely on neutrality. And don’t forget about the corporate identity. If it already exists, it’s logo or a brand is familiar to everyone, then your website should be “branded” with particular colors. But, nevertheless, don’t forget about the rules of contrast and motivation for action with the help of color combination.

Step 2: Color meanings

One day you will be asked: Why have you chosen exactly these colors? Of course, you can say that they’re looking nice, exactly like Steve Jobs choose “Apple” for his company. But it is better for your business to have a legend, a history about your website. Because if you don’t have corporate colors now, you’ll have them after launching. And it’s better to think about it in advance.

There is a list of common color meanings you can use in your history:

Black: power, conciseness.
White: freshness, clarity, purity.
Beige: modesty, neutrality, tenderness.
Ivory: style, elegance, comfort.
Gray: rigor, professionalism, control.
Violet: elite, luxury, romance.
Blue: calm, stability, security.
Green: growth, development, naturalness.
Orange: youth, friendship, vigor.
Yellow: fun, enthusiasm, energy.
Red: passion, action, activity.

Step 3: Web design color matching services

You can build a color palette from scratch or inspire by special services. There are some of them:

If you don’t know which color should be on a website, open a gallery with all kinds of color combinations. At these websites you can create color schemes and use those that were created by other people. Web color coordinator can become a huge inspiration for you and will help in finding new ideas.

Step 4: Color combination principles

Colour coordination website can be useful for beginners. You can only use one of them, which you find the most comfortable for yourself. Or visit any designers sources for inspiration. But don’t think it is enough. The color scheme designer for websites should be familiar with Isaac Newton color wheel. It was invented for more than 400 years, and you can say it is outdated. Although, a lot of principles really have changed since that time, the concept remains the same.

There are 5 schemes that will help you in selecting colors for a website:

Monochromatic (Monologous);
Complementary;
Analogues;
Triadic;
Tetradic.

Each scheme has its own features and nuances, and you only need time and practice to master them completely.

If you want to navigate quickly in the selection of colors, learn a few simple rules:

Tones that are close in spectrum are harmonizing. For example, pink and orange are located next to the red in the circle.
Additional shades it is a pair located opposite. It can be blue with yellow, green with red. You can’t use them on equal terms: one is always the main, the other is additional. These combinations are used when some information needs to be emphasized. For example, blue background, and yellow for the accent.
The main elements of the spectrum in painting are red, yellow, blue (RYB). And they cannot be obtained by mixing other shades. But in digital format this circuit does not work. Web design uses the RGB color model: red, green, blue.

There are much more rules and schemes in color theory, and we named only the main ones. Anyway, you can use color combinations for websites design from the Isaac Newton color wheel. And they will perfectly work together.