Good Web Site Design Uses 
Color And Layout As Sales Tools!

© John Dow

Did you know that the color and layout of a web site design could have a huge impact on selling your product or service? One of the key factors in good web site design is establishing a friendly and attractive web site using color and layout. And that’s where a lot of beginning webmasters go awry.

If you look at any of the available professional web site templates you’ll see that the colors and the layout blend with the content. Web site templates can be a great guide to showing the inexperienced how to combine color and elements. This is especially important for the color challenged.

I have to admit I am partial to both red and blue. But that doesn’t always work well for a web site. So it’s important to step outside your own preferences when designing a web site. Many tests have been done on colors and impact for web site design.

Colors can often complement the product or service, or the company’s logo design. Some companies even use a color to brand their service or product, like UPS does with brown. Not my first choice in colors but it appears to be working well for them.

Colors can have an impact on mood and cultural significance. Red is a universal color for attention, yellow for caution, and green for approval. But there are exceptions, green hats in China indicate infidelity for a woman. Red implies danger in many cultures. So colors can affect the mood and emotional response of the viewer.

Men and women definitely view colors differently. Women prefer red, black, and bright colors. Men prefer blue, orange, and darker colors. Although most of the impact is psychological or emotional, it can have a positive or negative effect on buying products or services.

Dark and foreboding colors may deliver a message not intended. Bright and colorful designs on a web site selling a serious product or service (like medical products to treat a terminally ill patient) can definitely show a lack of sympathy and put off potential buyers.

Some colors may actually render the words unreadable to some people. Using light yellow or blue type on a white background is hard for many to see, not too mention not very attractive. Black backgrounds with white type certainly have enough contrast, but may miss the boat on creating the appropriate mood or emotion.

Most experts agree that neutral backgrounds and dark blue or black type are the most legible and readable for most viewers. Using other colors for emphasis is fine, as long as you don’t over do it. Having more than 3-4 colors on any page can diminish the impact of any one of the colors.

Too many colors, just like too many fonts (type styles) can agitate the reader and create a negative experience. And when you are trying to convince someone to buy something, that’s not a very effective presentation. Too little contrast makes viewing difficult, too much contrast irritates the reader. 

Another problem faced by any web site designer is how the color will appear on different monitor and computers. Some colors have a tendency to not produce the same look on any monitor or video card. Each computer may have a different rendering technology and therefore produce a different hue or color.

Some video cards and monitors can only display 256 colors (it used to be about 16). There are also other factors such as the type of monitor (LCD display much differently than tube type) and available ram on the video card (more ram usually means more colors). But there is a way to help control this chaos.

There is a "standard" of sorts that is called Browser Friendly or Browser Safe colors. Netscape originally established this standard years ago and many still rely on it today. All of the major browsers have adopted this color set to help web site designers with choosing colors that display the same across all video devices.

Without getting too technical, these colors are limited to the basic 256 available on any computer equipment including our friends with Macs. These browser safe colors will display the same across all makes and models of equipment. You can see the colors and Hex values here:

Web Site Safe Color Chart

The major concern is not to distract from the message of your web site, whether it be informational or selling a product or service. Don’t go for the big fancy website design and forget the purpose of the web site. That’s especially important for web sites designed to sell a product or service. Good Web Site Design uses color and layout for sales tools.