Metamorphosis Design Blog

Psychology behind the colors that can make or break your website’s success.

Did you know that the values associated with colors can have a significant impact on your website’s success? And did you know that you can change your visitor’s feeling, mood and reaction by using different colors on your website?

Some professional web designers do not realize the impact that a single color can have on their project when designing a website for their clients. In reality, the meaning of colors will send the first message of your website to your visitors. You don’t have to be a genius to find out why since it is obvious that the first thing they (visitors) see is the color of your site!

I have studied one hundred visitors to evaluate their patience for uploading a web page. First, I tried a plain black background page and the average waiting time was up to 2.47 seconds. Then I tried a plain white background page and the average wait time for uploading the web page increased to 4.89 Seconds.

The reason is just fear. People are afraid from black and darkness and they feel vulnerable when they see a plain black page. I won’t go in detail about this subject in this article but if you would like to know more you can always visit our site at websitedevelopmenttech.com and get more information about color psychology.

What color should you use when designing your website?

Before answering this question you should do some research about your target audiences and find out about their character, behavior, mood, emotion … etc. I’m not asking you to go and find each individual and interview them to find out their feelings and emotions. All you need to do is find the answer of these two questions:

1. What is the market segmentation that you are targeting?
a. Age

b. Gender

c. Culture

d. Geographic location

2. Why are they coming to your website?

Let’s take a closer look at these two questions.

A. Market Segmentation:

a. Age: What is the most appropriate color for the age group that your website is targeting.

b. Gender: Men and Women have different taste and they react differently to colors. For example, the color pink is more appealing to women.

c. Culture: Colors mean different things to different cultures around the world. People associate colors to special events in their culture. For example, white is the symbol of purity and virtue in some cultures while in others white is associated with mourning and grief.

d. Geographic Location: Sometimes geographic location can change people’s interpretation of certain colors. For example, people that are living in a desert area tend to be more passionate toward bright colors from yellow to orange vs. people that are living in the mountains.

B. Why are they coming to your website?

a. That is a very important question which determines the mood and feeling of your visitors. For example, people go to a lawyer’s or a doctor’s website because they have a problem and they want to be FIXED. This means they are not really excited or happy about that issue. Although, this may not be the case all the time there are some exceptions such as plastic surgeons, patent attorneys… etc.

As a designer, once you know your target markets then you can decide what color to choose to get the best possible outcome for your site. Sometimes you may end up changing some colors that you thought would be interesting to your visitors.

Remember, no matter how much you know and how hard you try, there is no guarantee that you can make it the first time. That is why it is important to monitor the results of your website and know how visitors are interacting with your site so you can change your mistakes and learn from it.

Best Regards,

Shawn Davari
Author Bio
Shawn Davari offers expert advice on internet marketing, website design, and search engine optimization. You can subscribe to 6 weeks FREE optimization workshop by visiting his website at California Web Designer where you will find a great deal of free information on Internet Marketing, SEO, and website design.

Reading a website is not similar to reading a book or a newspaper, therefore before you start spilling money on campaigns be sure your site is built in accordance with internet writing standards. Let’s talk about few simple rules you don’t want to break when building a website.

Make a clear statement.If the visitor does not understands what is your website about, most chances he won’t be there for a long time. The main issue of creating a good content is to be sharp and clear about your goal.

Don’t waste your visitor’s time. Time is money. Most people decide whether they are interested in what the website has to offer in just two seconds. Therefore make sure your landing page provides the most crucial and appealing information about your business.
Number one time waster is a heavy loading page with lots of flash animations and pictures. Make sure your web pages are not too heavy otherwise you might lose your visitors before they entered your website.
Most of the visitors need to find what they are looking for fast; otherwise they look for it elsewhere. As a webmaster you must make sure your data is well categorizes and divided to relevant pages, categories, headlines and sub-titles. A visitor must be able to navigate your website easily and successfully.
Avoid too much “Special affects”. By this I mean don’t include too much flash movies and avoid using music if you don’t have to. As we mentioned earlier, Flash has a large loading time which damages viewer experience, besides too much flash may be annoying and search engines can’t read it.

Music is a great thing, but somehow music and websites do not fit too well. If you want to put some background tune anyway, make sure a user can silence it quickly and easily. Or in contrary , let the user click “Play” and begin the music when he decides.

Pop-ups and new pages. If you have links in your site, I strongly advise you not to use the pop-up option and not to open these links in new window. Seemingly pop-ups and new windows are a very good idea if we don’t want the visitor to navigate from our website but many years of experience shows that users prefer to click “Back” buttons. As to pop-ups, most of browsers tend to block them, and you don’t want to waste your viewer time on enabling pop-ups.

Use standard fonts which are supported by all browsers, like Arial and Times New Roman. You don’t want your viewers to get gibberish and go away from your website. Don’t use very small or very large fonts. You don’t want your pages to smear for miles and you don’t want to scare away people with poor vision

Gally is a website developer and marketing manager at Site123.com – the leading Content Managment System and Web Development Company

There are lots of useful tips to follow in order to design an effective and high-quality website. But among those recommendations, one that is given high significance and proper attention is to achieve fast loading website. This should be given high importance because most visitors are time savvy and they really don’t want to waste their time waiting for the slow loading of the site. Since every second counts, the loading of a particular page should not take long. If the designer does not manage to do this, there’s a possibility that the site’s visitor will just look for other sites that will provide them the same resources but with better and faster loading time. Just check out our secrets that will be helpful to create a well-designed and fast loading website for you to keep your visitor stay longer on your site.

1. Lessen the Use of Images

The best key to achieve a fast loading website is to design it with minimum images. Using graphics is essential in Web Design that really enhances the overall appearance of the page. They also gives life to the site making it more attractive and colorful. However too much use of images can slow down its loading time. To prevent this to happen, include only necessary images to make the page simple, neat and professional-looking. Just bear in mind that making the site simple is truly effective to bring out what’s best on your site.

2. Avoid Using Bulky Images

As mentioned earlier, using images may affect the loading time of a page. So if the website really needs to include many pictures, you must avoid using bulky and large images to make its loading faster. Make sure that you reduce the size of an image into smaller one for about 10kb (maximum) for you to manage your load speed. On the other hand, if you want to show a large photo for the sake of your visitors, just place a small image or thumbnail on your page that has a link to a larger one. In that case, the visitors can have an option whether they are willing to wait to view for a larger image to load.

3. Use Tables in Creating Simple Icons

Instead of using images as icons on your site, just use tables in creating menus. Making tables creatively does not only give your site some great-looking designs but also help you to achieve a faster loading time.

4. Minimize the Use of Flash

Flash animations do catch the attention of most visitors. However, if you do not manage to use them properly, they can give bad impressions on your site such as bogging down visitor’s system resources and slowing down the loading of the page. To avoid these bad effects, as much as possible avoid using flash animations because it keeps your visitor waiting for a longer time, however if it’s really needed, try out to minimize them.

5. Use CSS Styles

Since CSS Style is just a simple HTML code, it loads very fast. So to make a well-designed website that can load faster, use css styles effectively and creatively. This will catch the attentions of most visitors because of designing its text with some cool effects.

6. Minimize the Use of Animated Gifs

Just like images, animated gifs can also slow down the loading of a page. So if it’s not really important to include that, just avoid using that effect. It’s because it can also be irritating for some visitors to see animated gifs. But if this will help in enhancing the design of the site, just be sure to minimize them.

7. Keep Monitoring the Loading of the page

After you have successfully designed your site, always keep monitoring of your loading page. Having a regular check up for the loading time of your site, will also help to better improve it, in order for you to keep your visitor stay long on and make them come back again for more updates on your site.

About the Author
This article is written by Cecille Gamas, who works as an article contributor in Wicked Innovations, a web site design company that offers professional web site design services. Just check out their website and see why it stands out in Web Design and Development.