Are you designing a website for a local business and possibly looking into methods for ensuring your design accurately reflects a business? Great news! We believe the colours selected within a website design is an important factor that has the potential to make or break a website. So it’s crucial to understand how the use of colours on any website should be a designers top priority. In this article, we share our thoughts and ideas to assist even the most rounded designer when it comes to designing a website.
Briefs & Preparation
One of the most essential tasks before undertaking any design work is to have an understanding of a website’s purpose and goals. Could the main purpose be relevant to increasing the volume of customer enquiries for a local business? Perhaps it could it be to build an online shopping website with the ambition of increasing product sales? In any case, finding out the ambitions of a website and identifying what your client is wishing to achieve is very beneficial. It’s also imperative to be aware of the audience your website is targeting, as this is important to ensure your website design best reflects what your visitors are likely to favour. Once you do have an understanding of the objective and purpose of a website, you can then start gathering ideas to construct a design which coincides with your clients specifications.
Understanding Colours
There are millions of colours available to choose from for your design, however, this can introduce confusion when determining a colour scheme. Before carelessly nominating colours to use on your design, it’s best to know how each unique colour has its own meaning. Colours are very powerful at setting a tone and emotion on a design. When a visitor first enters a website you want them to immediately process as much information as possible regarding the business in as little time as possible, and the colours used play such an influential role with this. For example, warm colours (such as red and yellow) can help to create a sense of warmth and passion, and can also help setup an aggressive tone. In contrast, lighter colours (such as blue) provide a much less forceful look on a design. To bring this into context, a therapist business could benefit from a lighter colour scheme to create a relaxed experience. While a skydiving experience business could perhaps use a more aggressive colour, such as red, to create excitement and reflect the business.
Building a Colour Scheme
It’s certainly not the most conventional technique to use only a single colour for your design. Many designers opt for creating an imaginative colour scheme, usually with 3 unique colours, to use throughout a design. While you may have already set the main colour, it’s important that the additional colours genuinely work well together within your colour scheme. Paletton is a convenient online tool that aids you in building stunning colour schemes for websites. It’s also essential to think about the business you’re designing a website for. Do they already have existing branding with a colour scheme? Is the business instantly recognisable just by their colours (check this out)? If so, it’s critical to use a businesses existing branding colours to create consistency within their branding.
Using The Colours
Once you have constructed a dazzling colour scheme, you can then begin to populate your design with your colour scheme. When using these colours it’s important to be consistent, as colours can help to revolutionise the meaning and appearance of any website. For example, ensuring product prices use the same colour is a great way to create consistency throughout a design. Visitors are also particularly good at detecting how particular colours convoy how important an element may possibly be. If you select a colour which is very bright and bold, this can be perfect for making important elements on a website stand out, such as any special offers. By using this method, we believe it will improve the users experience and ensure your design is outstanding.
Overview
Overall, creating a design concept for a business website isn’t the simplest of jobs. It’s imperative to recognise how the colours you choose, and how you use them, can completely revolutionise any design and make it even more exceptional. If you have any questions or would like to share your thoughts regarding this article, please do not hesitate to send us a message using our online contact form.
Posted in Advice
