Psychology of Color in Web Design
Posted by Sandy in 
The colors you use on your website can greatly affect the mood of your visitors. By understanding the psychology of colors, you can easily improve your web site design, create a memorable brand, and increase your conversion rate.
You only have one chance to make a great first impression and capture the attention of your website visitor. Once you’ve got their attention, what does your site move them to do? Are they moved to explore further or purchase your product? Your choice of colors can be of influence to your site visitors. Here is a very brief summary of the perceptions and emotions colors can convey:
Red is mostly associated with boldness, excitement, strength, power, passion, determination, and courage. Red increases the heart rate and creates a sense of urgency, as often seen in clearance sales.
Orange radiates cheerfulness, warmth, energy, enthusiasm and creativity. Orange creates a call to action: buy or subscribe.
Yellow is a clear attention-grabber and mostly associated with liveliness, happiness, comfort, and energy.
Pink is usually associated with femininity, romance, tenderness, and has also been shown to have a calming effect. Pink is often used to market products to women and young girls.
Purple has traditionally long been associated with power, nobility and wealth. It is also strongly associated with wisdom and spirituality, as well as magic and mystery. Purple is often seen in beauty or anti-aging products.
Blue is one of the most liked colors, especially by men. It is linked with depth and stability, professionalism, security and trust, as often seen with banks and businesses.
Green is the color of nature and everything natural. It is identified with safety and optimism, health, durability and reliability, harmony and freshness. It is a calming and stress relieving color. Green is also associated with wealth, and is the easiest color for the eyes to process.
Brown is a reassuring color of endurance, relaxation and confidence. It can also portray comfort, strength, credibility, and stability.
Gray provokes feelings of conservatism, traditionalism and seriousness, security, reliability, and maturity.
White signifies purity and innocence. Further associations are cleanliness, freshness, newness and simplicity.
Black is, especially in design, an elegant and stylish color which can imply sophistication, power, and strength, or provoke feelings of mystery. It is often used to market luxury products.
You can use the above as a guide when choosing colors for your website, logo, or marketing material. It really boils down to your target audience and what psychological message you want to convey in colors.
20 Ways to Advertise Your Website For Free
Here are some steps you can take to market your website for FREE, and increase its visibility:
1. List Your URL on Everything You Can:
Maximize your advertising efforts by listing your web site address on everything you do. Print the URL on your company’s letterhead, business cards, shirts or uniforms, as well as company and/or personal vehicles. Be sure your URL is listed on your marketing material as well, including any print advertising, brochures, flyers, phone book or magazine ads, direct mail, or any other advertising you may do.
2. E-mail Signatures:
Ensure that your e-mail signature includes your contact details and your website address.
3. Google Maps/Google Local:
Create an account with Google and use Google Maps or Google Local to ensure your business shows up in the search results on Google.com. When Google incorporates these results on its page, it increases the value of its local search and Maps application.
4. Yahoo! Local Listings:
Despite Google being the reigning search engine, Yahoo! remains a popular option. Sign up on Yahoo! Local and take advantage of all the free exposure your website can get!
5. GetListed:
GetListed is a resource for small business owners to learn more about the way their businesses are listed online. The service is free, and well worth using.
6. Local.com:
Apart from Google and Yahoo!, local.com can help potential customers find you after you have signed up for a free listing.
7. Thumbtack.com:
Thumbtack isn’t like typical local search directories that return business listings with ratings and reviews. Instead, Thumbtack gives you the ability to vet, contact and book service professionals the moment you find them. You can check us out on thumbtack under Web & Logo Design or visit their site here.
8. Yellow Pages:
Ensure that you are listed on the online version of the popular phone directory. A basic listing is free.
9. Craigslist:
One of the most popular sites online, Craigslist allows you to post free classified ads, which would be visible for 45 days.
10. Industry Directories:
Submit your site to industry directories and organizations. No matter what industry your business is in, there are online directories that you can list your site on.
11. Start a Blog:
A web log (a.k.a. blog) is a collection of short articles. Blogs have become extremely popular, and when used regularly, help your website’s search engine ranking. Companies such as WordPress (wordpress.com) or Blogger (www.blogger.com) will host your blog for free. The key here is to blog regularly with useful, information-rich articles on interesting topics.
12. Join Social Networking Sites:
Joining social networking sites, such as Twitter (twitter.com), Facebook (facebook.com), and LinkedIn (linkedin.com), and linking these to your website (and vice versa), increase your website’s exposure. Here is a list of social networking sites.
13. Join a Forum or Online Community:
Just about every topic has a forum or online community site where people discuss it. By contributing to these discussion groups, you can inform your customers, advertise your business, and increase traffic to your website.
14. Reciprocal Links:
Exchange web site links with other sites of similar content. For example, if you run a construction website, ask for link exchanges and affiliations with your suppliers or industry organizations.
15. E-mail Marketing:
E-mail marketing is one of the most powerful and effective marketing tools available to businesses today. Even small businesses are tapping into this incredible resource. Reasons to send out an e-mail newsletter include invitations, e-mail marketing campaign, latest news, press releases, etc.
16. Write and Submit Articles:
There are thousands of article directories online (just google ‘article directory’) and most of the time you just complete a simple sign up and start writing/submitting. Placing your articles on these popular sites can help generate traffic to your website.
17. Make a Video:
Make a video about your company/website and what it offers and post it on tubemogul.com which will upload it to YouTube, MetaCafe video, google video, yahoo video, msn video, myspace video, aol video and more. This will give you 5 times the distribution of your promotional video.
18. StumbleUpon:
StumbleUpon is known as a site that is able to generate huge amounts of traffic for a website. Once your site has been “stumbled” upon, it is entered into the network and it is seen by countless people in that interest group, potentially spreading out to other interest groups into other networks.
19. Social News Websites:
Social news websites, like Digg are made for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting, voting, and commenting on links and stories. From small bloggers to large media brands, publishers everywhere are using social news websites to engage with their readers and increase traffic to their content.
20. Social Bookmarking Websites:
Social bookmarking sites, like Delicious, allows you to save all your bookmarks online, share them with other people, and see what other people are bookmarking. These sites have the potential to increase your website traffic.
The key is to find and use every possible opportunity to promote your web site. Performing the free website advertising suggestions above will greatly increase your website’s visibility.