Choosing The Right Colors for your Website

We have already gone through the important points to be noted for the development of a website- Design,Technical, Content and Quality guidelines. Now, let me share with you something interesting and different. i.e., choosing the right color combination to your website. The color scheme you choose for your website is as important as the content and design.

As we all know, each color has its own effect on us, physically and mentally. Some studies have proved that red color has very strong impact on us. It can even raise your blood pressure. It is interesting that in Casinos, they use red lights because people gamble more in red light!! But, blue color is having the opposite effect; it calms down our mind. So, we can conclude that there exist particular emotions and meanings associated with each color. But certain colors represent opposite emotions. For example, black color represents power & strength as well as evil & depression. Any way, I personally don’t prefer black color ;-)

Is this the only reason for choosing the right color scheme to your website?? There are some more things to be considered.

•Creating Brand Awareness: Many companies already have their own color patterns and schemes. So, while developing a website, it is better to use the same color scheme. This can build up good brand awareness.

•Website Type: This is a major factor to decide the exact color combination. Suppose you are developing website for a business, website may be blue or white. Green color is also preferable for businesses/ corporate as it represents power and money.


•Who visits your website: If your target audience is young and vibrant, you may use red, orange etc. Suppose your website is more visited by senior citizens or those with vision troubles, better you go for grey or black& white color pattern. Colors are preferred according to gender also. Thus, men tend to prefer blue and orange to red and yellow, while women prefer red to blue and yellow to orange.

Some Facts and Studies

There are colors associated with shopping!! It is said that certain colors make people react differently while shopping. So, this can be taken under consideration while building an E-commerce website. Normal people respond better to sky blue, pink etc. Those who insist on budget while shopping will like teal, navy and pink. But, impulse buyers tend to respond to blue, black, red-orange etc. Also, free yourself from prejudices: if you are addressing to women, do not automatically employ pink.

If your website addresses an audience larger than your country of origin or it is meant to attract prospects from a specific country, research the specific meanings of colors in different nations. White is considered as color of peace in Western countries, but it stands for unhappiness in China, Japan and India. Pink is very much appreciated in Japan, but is considered as non-manly color in India. It is up to you to obtain creative colors that will be internationally accepted, but you have to do your homework quite well.


Your website can be hard to read, making visitors to become uncomfortable and close the page altogether. First of all, the text color should stand out from the background color. If the text color doesn’t contrast with background color, it will be unreadable.


Use a natural palette of colors.

They are more pleasing than any of their artificial counterparts. You may start with say, three base colors that are related or similar and those don’t contrast with each other and two colors that contrast with the base colors. Then, adjust the brightness, hue, or saturation of color to get the best combination that works best for your website.

Now you might have realized the importance of color scheme in websites. Take enough time to choose the right color combination that conveys your company’s brand, goal and message. Choosing a wrong schema has its own negative impact on your website. So, what I wish to tell you is just break the rules and think out of the box! Don’t be afraid to use any color combination, which you think can produce positive color.

Meaning of Colors

•Red: energy, passion, excitement, power, aggression, danger.
•Blue: coolness, spirituality, freedom, patience, loyalty, trustworthiness, sadness, depression.
•Yellow: light, optimism, happiness, brightness, joy.
•Green: life, naturalness, restfulness, health, wealth, prosperity, decay, toxicity.
•Orange: friendliness, warmth, approachability, energy, playfulness, courage.
•Violet: wisdom, sophistication, celebration.
•White: purity, cleanliness, youth, freshness, peace.
•Black: power, elegance, secrecy, mystery, evil.
•Gray: security, maturity, reliability.
•Pink: romance a feminine color.
•Brown: comfort, strength, stability, credibility.

Webmaster Guidelines- Quality

In my previous posts, we came across the Design, Technical and Content Guidelines. Now, let us see what all Quality Guidelines are to be followed:

• Remember- we are making websites primarily for users and not for search engines. It is not good to present different content to search engines than you provide to users. This is referred commonly as “cloaking”.

• It is better you avoid tricks that improve your search rankings. Just provide your users something which you would have given evenif the search engines didn’t exist.

• Using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is the preferred way of separating content from style in quality web pages. With CSS, you can store all style information for your web site in one single document. All major browsers have support for both the CSS 1 and CSS 2 standards. Using CSS will improve the quality of your web site and increases the readability for many different browsers. It will also greatly reduce your web site development costs.

• Avoid links to web spammers on the web that adversely affects your search ranking itself. Also, it is better you don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your Page Rank.

• Using unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings etc s not recommended by Google. Google doesn’t recommend the use of products hat send automatic or programmatic queries to it.

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links and don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects. Avoid sending automated queries to Google.

• A validator is a software program that can check your web pages against the web standards. When using a validator to check HTML, XHTML or CSS documents, the validator returns a list of errors found, according to your chosen standard.

• Your website should not be a keyword-stuffed one. Also, there should not be any duplicate content.

• Don't create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, Trojans etc.

• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

Webmaster Guidelines- Content

In this blog, we will see the guidelines that have to be followed while preparing website content. Hope you have gone through my previous posts- Design Guidelines and Technical Guidelines.
• Every page should be focused on a particular topic, if possible. If you have different products or services, better you discuss about each one in different pages. In this way, your products/ services will get noticed more than if they were listed in a single page.

• Like unique pages, you should contain unique page titles that give an overview of your service / product. So don’t forget to write accurate, relevant page titles.

• Give attention to the “description” meta tag. Surely the search engines will look at the “keywords” meta tag. But if you could write a unique and pointed “description” meta tags for every page, it will create a great impact much than the “keywords” meta tag. So remember- a well-crafted description can persuade searches to click your link.

• More often you add good content to your website (articles, latest news, blog posts etc.); more often crawlers will visit your website. The benefit will be seen when you add a new product or service. The crawlers will find and index your page soon.

• It is more time consuming and tiring for eyes to read from computer screens. So, try to make the content simple and clear. Avoid jargon and complex sentences in your website. Using short words and active phrases can also be considered as a good technique.

• The website content has to be written for your visitors first, I agree. But remember- search engines are also reading your website. So, try to include as much keywords as possible while trying to make your website content simple and easy to understand by people. Please don’t make your website a keyword-stuffed one.

• Assigning single and unique idea to each paragraph will help your website visitors to scan through your web page content. Also, they will more likely move on to the next paragraph, hopefully thinking there is some usable kind of information.

• It is better to follow a ‘Front-load content strategy in website content also. I.e., putting the conclusion first and then explaining how and why. This will help people to quickly scan through the opening sentence and to decide whether to read the rest content.

• Boldening important words which describe main point will also makes your website content readable.

• Using lists will help readers to read the information vertically. Also lists are easier to scan and less intimidating.

• Left-aligned text is easier to read than a justified one. Normally center-aligned and justified text makes reading very slow. So, readers may skip the content if it is time consuming.

Webmaster Guidelines- Technical

Here we come across some technical points to be noted while developing a website:
• If you use fancy features like JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash, search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your website. On the other hand, if you could use a text browser such as Lynx, then you will get good result.

• For tracking individual user behavior, allow search bots to crawl your website. This doesn’t require session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. But, since the access pattern is different, this may result in incomplete indexing of your website.

• Web publisher should always assume that a visitor doesn’t have any plug-ins installed. So, while publishing a content that requires a plug-in, clear links to the relevant download should be provided to the visitor.

• If you buy a content management system, make sure that the system creates pages and links that search engines can crawl.

• Monitor your site's performance and optimize load times. Fast sites increase user satisfaction and improve the overall quality of the web.

• Your web pages should be designed so as to load within 15 seconds over a 28.8k modem. Remember that if a page doesn't load in 8 seconds you could lose 1/3 of your visitors. For a page to download in ten seconds the 'page size' (i.e. the sum of the file sizes for all the elements that make up a page including the HTML file and all embedded objects (e.g. image files) should be no greater than 80Kb.The user should be presented with predicted download times and/or file size details when downloading a document, video clip or other multimedia element.

• Ensure that advertisements (Google ad sense) do not affect search engine rankings.

• Publishers should atleast use HTML 4.01 or above as the standard HTML version. This should be declared in the “Document Type Definition” at the head of HTML pages.

Webmaster Guidelines- Design

• A good website should be a unique and information-rich site. The website should be with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link. You should also write the web page content accurately and clearly.

• Carefully select the keywords that users would type to find your website. Don’t forget to include these keywords within your website.

• Creating a site map in your website with links that point to the important web pages will be a great idea. If there is large number of links, you may break the site map into multiple pages. So, better keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number.

• You have to use actual text instead of images to display content or links. Your visitors may be able to read the text on images, but the Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images. They will be able to learn about what your website is about only if you could give plenty of text. If you must use images, consider using the "ALT" attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.

• Try to have a text-based site menu. The main website menu may be made up of small graphical buttons that change colors when cursor is moved over it. Since you don’t use a poorly-written JavaScript or DHTMLcode, Google crawler will surely be able to follow these graphical links. But, it will be better if your website contains atleast one text-based site menu.

• Remember- a Flash-based home page is not user-friendly. It may draw the attention of a visitor for the first time. But, after that the visitor simply skips your web page like anyone else. As users are interested in grabbing information quickly from the web, more than 80 percent of people hate Flash intros.

• Another important point to be taken care of website design is not to use Frames to build your website. It makes your website difficult to link to. Quality links from other websites gives your website better search engine rankings. If you avoid the use of frames, more easily others can link to your website.

• Check for broken links if present as it may affect your website badly.

• If your website is dynamic, not every search engine spider crawls the web pages well.