Your website’s color scheme plays a crucial role in shaping your audience’s perception and experience. A well-chosen color palette can convey professionalism, friendliness, creativity, and more while improving brand recognition and encouraging visitor engagement. This article will guide you through the process of selecting the best matching colors for your website and help you create a cohesive and engaging color scheme.
Understanding the Impact of Website Color Schemes
Your website is a landing page for your online audience, and it tells a story about your identity and your purpose. And believe it or not, different color schemes on your site can portray varying levels of professionalism, friendliness, openness, and more.
So, what does your website’s color scheme say about you?
Professionalism
Black and white color schemes convey a polished and formal look. Incorporating touches of purple and gold can add distinction without compromising professionalism. This sleek, modern look can give the same impression as a modern home or office and makes your website bold and attractive.
Friendliness
If you want your website to feel friendly, some colors work better than others. Dark blues and greens are your best bet for making your website appear comforting and welcoming. Many charities and nonprofit organizations use these colors to convey a sense of calm.
Efficiency
Some businesses may want to alert customers to their efficiency and speed. For example, home repair businesses like roofing companies and insurance services want visitors to spend as little time as possible on their websites and, instead, call them directly for a quote.
For this, a bold color scheme of red and white can create that sense of urgency. These colors, combined with quick and snappy calls to action like “Call for a quote” or “Contact us now,” can encourage potential customers to hop right from your website to the phone, giving you business as quickly as possible.
Creativity
Creative types may use their website’s color scheme to portray the uniqueness or relevance of their business. Services like photography, videography, custom art, and calligraphy can benefit from some interesting earth tones like mellow oranges and browns.
An orange hue communicates a level of playfulness that may be important in your field, while a light brown can make you appear down-to-earth and professional. Work with these colors together and you’ll have a fun, playful website that gives viewers a glimpse into what your business is all about — and hopefully, creates a one-of-a-kind look for those who may be viewing many websites of similar businesses.
Stimulation
Websites that stimulate the minds of viewers generally contain bright colors, like yellow and pink. Though these two colors don’t necessarily work in tandem, choosing one of them as the main color for your site can spark your visitors’ imaginations. Add in primary colors like red and blue for a website for children, especially one where they’re encouraged to learn and grow, either through tools on the site itself or in the physical space that your website is promoting.
Creating a Cohesive Color Scheme
Is your website color scheme encouraging visitors to browse your site for longer periods of time, subscribe to your newsletter, or commit to making purchases? Unless you’re investing time and effort into finding the best matching colors to form a coherent and complementary scheme, then the answer might be “no.”
Here are three techniques that can help you avoid this problem, while ensuring that your content is easier to read and has emotional impact on your readers.
1. Prioritize Readability
If your visitors struggle to read the text on your website, then all of your hard work will be for naught. People aren’t going to strain themselves to read something if they can find the same information on a competitor’s website instead.
When creating a color scheme for your website, it’s crucial to use contrast appropriately. After all, using yellow text on a white background isn’t the most legible combination. There’s no reason to overthink or get too elaborate with your design choices. Select a background and text color combination that has enough contrast to be easily read across desktop and mobile screens.
2. Use Contrast for Information Hierarchy
Once you confirm that your content can be easily read, take your color strategy to the next level by using contrast to provide subtle context for what your visitors are reading.
For example, take a look at the Didi theme from the WordPress.com theme showcase:
Notice how the best matching colors (like black and white) are combined to set the tone and style, while the accent color (yellow) grabs the reader’s attention and directs them to important links and action items?
3. Drive Emotional Responses
In addition to providing a comfortable reading experience and information hierarchy, smart website color matching also allows you to strengthen emotional connections with your website visitors.
All colors have general emotional components. For example, red is often associated with love and boldness, and green is linked to ideas of wealth. The question is, what overall tone and emotional impact do you want to deliver with your website? Refer to this post from Art Therapy to get a better understanding of color psychology, and how to best coordinate your website’s color scheme to align with your goals.
While understanding color psychology can be immensely useful, remember that you shouldn’t pick colors just to elicit emotional responses from readers. Instead, pick a primary color and use a site like Coolors.co or Colormind.io to find a palette that complements it. This way, your website will convey the correct tone in a welcoming and aesthetically pleasing way.
Choosing Website Color Schemes
By choosing an effective color palette for your website, you can help visitors remember your aesthetic, cementing your content in the minds of your audience. This can result in more return visits, better customer retention, and a more dedicated readership. You should match the site colors to your purpose and the tone you want to convey. Once you’ve established the purpose and tone,, you can move forward with coordinating colors to help reach your goals.
Use this infographic as a starting point to help you choose your website’s color palette.
Of course, different types of brands fit best with different color schemes. Some need highly saturated, bright colors like hot pink, yellow, or teal, while others do better with more muted, unsaturated colors like beige, dark blue, and light gray.
Also, some do well with lots of color, while others use mainly black and white, with one or two accent colors.
Keep in mind these important tips when picking the perfect color scheme for your website, and check out the following examples that illustrate the concepts..
- Identify your brand image – Determine the image you want to project (cheerful, minimalist, or modern, for example) and choose a color palette that resonates with your target audience.
- Consider saturation levels – Different brands require varying saturation levels, with some needing bright, saturated colors, while others thrive with more muted, unsaturated hues.
- Balance your palette – Create a harmonious blend of colors, using mainly black and white with one or two accent colors to add visual interest.
A good place to start choosing your website color palette is by choosing the image you want to broadcast (cheerful, minimalist, or modern, for example), and begin playing around with colors until you have a palette that will resonate with your target market.
A Cheerful Color Palette Example
For example, a “cheerful” color palette with bright, energetic hues works well for bloggers writing on family topics. Money Saving Mom has a set of bright colors that she uses consistently throughout her website to help her stand out from other “boring” financial blogs.
A Minimalist Color Palette Example
A website about minimalism, like Be More With Less, would naturally go for a minimalist color palette with subtle hues and saturation levels. It uses black, white, and gray as the main colors. This scheme doesn’t distract from the content, and the website features a few images to provide a splash of color.
A Modern Color Palette Example
A modern color palette, like the ones a lot of startups opt for, might look like MailPoet’s. This approach uses interesting accent colors to add pop.
Use WordPress.com to Pick Your Perfect Color Palette
When you select a WordPress.com plugin-enabled plan, you’ll be able to customize your chosen theme with both basic and extended color scheme options. Not only that, but you’ll also get control over background designs, fonts, and all your CSS to make your website brand as unique and memorable as possible.
Creating a cohesive and engaging website color scheme is essential for enhancing user experience and improving brand recognition. By understanding the impact of color schemes, prioritizing readability and emotional responses, and selecting a well-balanced color palette, you can create a memorable online presence that resonates with your target audience. Make the most of the customization options available with WordPress.com and elevate your website’s aesthetic to the next level.
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