psychology

When it comes to your website, there’s more to color choice than personal preference. The colors you choose can actually play a subtle, psychological role in how users feel about your brand and how likely they are to convert. Whether you’re building your first company webpage or looking for a way to refresh your digital marketing strategy, don’t underestimate the importance of your color choice when it comes to how users perceive your message and choose to convert.

Colors to communicate tone

Every color can display one or more emotions, and a wrong choice of website color may have an unintended message. In general, fiery colors like red, orange and yellow convey happiness, joy, excitement and pep. These might work for a real estate, marketing or travel website. Cool colors like green and blue communicate a tone of peace and harmony. Blue and green hues may work best for spa, personal care and home design website.

White tends to symbolize cleanliness and purity. This clean palette would work for architects, clothing companies and cleaners. Black can communicate a tone of dignity, elegance, depth and modernism. The color may work well for luxury branding, such as hotels, vacation rentals, real estate and cars.

Think about what traits or characteristics your user base is likely to favor based upon the color’s tone. Also think about what message will most convey your brand. Is there a match between these colors? If your brand is a calm blue but your users are young and energetic, you may want to combine a fiery color with your soothing blue to connect these tones.

Colors to draw attention

To draw attention to an advertisement, color works over 40 percent better than black and white. Even just a splash of color can draw a user’s attention toward a certain area of the page. Two companies — Performable and Ript Apparel — decided to change the color of their call-to-action. Performable went from green to red; Ript changed their button from green to yellow. The companies realized a 21 percent increase and 6.3 percent increase in conversions, respectively.

This illustrates an interesting lesson: If you feel you aren’t getting the conversion rate you want, you might need a small tweak to realize a higher rate. And time spent investigating how users perceive website elements may reward you with a higher ROI.

Once you have a prototype of your website, perform user testing to see how well your colors are working on your target demographic. Are users’ eyes drawn to your call to action? Are they getting stuck at some point during the conversion process? Is something else on the website actually competing with the call to action for user attention? By evaluating the user experience of your website before a launch, you can see what’s pworking for your target demographic as well as what isn’t working. You can make changes to improve the user experience and usability of your web design before the launch.

Harnessing the power of color to communicate emotion and tone and highlight areas of your website is only one step to communicate your call to action to users. Website copy, font and design still need to match up to a cohesive whole. A skilled web designer can help you achieve this.

sheldon Have you heard of the latest hullaballoo in geekdom? Or maybe I should say nerdom. I just read this post over at Forever Geek, talking about how a professor is proposing to ban the words “geek” and “nerd.” Why? He says that their use merely helps in propagating the negative connotations that have always been associated with them. He says this despite the fact that more and more people are starting to get into the idea of “cool geeks” or “cool nerds.”

David Anderegg, professor of psychology from Bennington College, says that these terms are derogatory and liken them to racial slurs. His opinion is that even if we try to make these terms cool, it only highlights the fact that they are of a negative nature.

Now I am no professor, but my take on this is that there is NO NEED to ban “geek” or “nerd.” Turn your television on and what do you see? Music geeks dancing and singing on Glee. We have geeks – and nerds as well – making us laugh till we bust our seams on The Big Bang Theory. Even shows which are not mainly focused on geeks and nerds have at least one character that fits the description. Think Criminal Minds. I love Spencer Reid, don’t you? Penelope Garcia?

If our society is slowly – or maybe not even that slowly – opening itself to the idea of cool and fun geeks and nerds, why should be even consider banning the words? Do they offend you? I certainly am not offended!

How Color Psychology Affects Conversions

Does “Geek” or “Nerd” Offend?