Choosing Colors for your Site

Before you search for the right colors, know what you want to communicate to your visitors, think about your site name, and how do you want people to feel when they visit your website? The color scheme of your site is one of the first things a visitor notices. Colors bring out emotions and your visitors will relate those feelings toward your site. Make sure you are giving your visitors the right feeling.

Color and Emotions

Red: Energy, passion, action, ambition and determination

Orange: Friendliness, cheerfulness, and confidence

Yellow: Optimism, clarity, and warmth

Green: Peace, balance, growth, and health

Blue: Trust, dependabilty, and strength

Purple: Creativity, imagination, and wisdom

Turquoise: Communication and clarity

Pink: Love, nurturing and girlish

Brown: Friendly, down-to-earth, comfort and material wealth

Gray: Balance, neutrality, and calm

White: Purity, innocence, wholeness and completion

How man Colors should be Used?

Now that you know what each color means and what it could represent about your site, how many colors should your site contain? The more colors you use on a site the more overwhelming and busy your site will look. Borrowing from interior and fashion design, the 60-30-10 rule states that three colors should be used in varying degrees (60%, 30%, 10%) to create the perfect harmony. When I create a site, I take the colors that the client wants and break them down into three main colors with the rest of the colors to use as needed or at all. I also like to remind my clients that WHITE space is your friend. Give your visitors some space to grasp what it is your site is saying or selling.

Color Resources

Some clients come to me with the colors they already know they want, some come to me with a graphic and from that graphic I pick the three main colors, some come to me and have NO idea where to even start to find the right colors for their site. First off.. think about your site name, pick your color mood from the colors listed above, visit lots of sites in your niche and see what the trend is, and finally, visit these sites for color inspiration and ideas:

Color Combos
COLOURlovers
Design Seeds