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A Layman’s Guide to Choosing Website Color Schemes

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John Jack
A Layman’s Guide to Choosing Website Color Schemes

Colors play a crucial role when it comes to branding and web design.

Wondering why?

According to research, the majority of snap buying decisions are virtually powered by color perception.

As far as websites are concerned, the first impression matters a great deal. Therefore, picking the right color scheme for your site is crucial to make it catchy, appealing, reliable, and rewarding.

Be careful while choosing the colors to add to your website color scheme. Different colors will convey different messages to your site visitors, which will modify their perception of your website, whether it was intended or not.

Have no idea where you should start? This step-by-step guide will help you create a website color scheme and prevent you from making the biggest blunders in web design.

The attention span of an average internet user is approximately eight seconds today, and that’s the amount of time you have got to persuade them to stay on your website and accomplish whatever they came looking for.

Having the right website color scheme will help you keep the audience engaged with color accents, subtle navigational components, and catchy branding.

Let’s dive into the details.

7 Steps to Build Your Website Color Scheme
  1. Identify Your Primary Color

If you are thinking about creating your own website color scheme, you have most probably chosen your primary color already. In case you have a logo or any other branding established, the chances are that there is one color dominating the designs. That is your primary color – the color your brand will be affiliated with.

If you still haven’t reached any final decision, you can conduct market research or browse a list of hex code palettes of some of the best renowned brands to get more ideas.

When you run into an aesthetically pleasing web design or picture, do not hold back from using a color picker to find out the hex code and include it in your list. There are plenty of popular tools available in the market to help you with the same.

  1. Choose the Number of Colors

Once you have finalized your primary color, next, you need to determine the number of colors you are going to add to the combination.

Typically, it is highly recommended to employ a mix of three colors. A triadic palette comprising three colors spaced out uniformly is an excellent point to start from. A triadic color scheme can be quite robust if it presents three primary dynamic colors, so web designers can often choose a mix of secondary shades.

You can also opt for the old web designer’s rule called the 60-30-10 rule when applying the color scheme to your web design.

This rule suggests that designers should not utilize the same amounts of all the selected colors and instead split them up into percentages and apply them to the web design appropriately.

  1. Utilize Secondary Colors When Required

Matching the secondary shades to your primary brand colors can be a long haul, but don’t lose hope just yet. You can find plenty of tools online that can help ease this task for you.

Wondering what the point of taking the trouble to get secondary colors anyway is?

Well, at times, a website will require much more than just a couple of primary colors. This particularly holds true for large sites that are loaded with landing pages and content.

Being able to visually separate titles, sidebars, buttons, captions, and other components enhance the overall user experience and boost the conversion rate.

Meanwhile, you might also want to consider various hues and tones of your primary colors rather than hunting for additional shades. Remember, at times, simplicity is the best strategy.

  1. Don’t Overlook the Neutral Colors (Black, White, and Grey)

While creating your website, you are going to need neutral shades as either background or for text or contrasting necessary components.

In the present-day web design, the role of neutral shades is pretty much the same as the role of white space – giving a break to the visitors and allowing them the time to consume and prioritize the information available on the given web page better.

As a thumb rule, you should have a dark and a light neutral shade for various use cases. Some most commonly used neutral colors are black, white, and grey. You can also use the hues of your primary colors as neutrals, although that is a lot more complex to match.

  1. Add Primary, Secondary and Neutral Colors in the Following Areas

Are you confused about how to apply the color scheme to your web design? Wondering which colors should be used where and why? Let’s give you some clarity on this.

  • Primary Colors: These should be applied to the “hot spots” on your web page. You should use these eye-catching, dynamic colors to grab the attention of your visitors and convince them to take the desired action(s). You should use primary colors to highlight elements such as the call to action buttons, titles, download forms, and other crucial components.
  • Secondary Colors: You can use secondary colors to highlight the relatively less critical information present on the web page, including subheadings, secondary buttons, active menu items, backgrounds, supporting content such as testimonials and frequently asked questions, and so on.
  • Neutral Colors: While these colors will most probably be used for background and text, they can also prove useful in incredibly colorful sections of the website in order to help lighten it and refocus the eye.
  1. Go Through the Process Multiple Times

When you ultimately work out your website color scheme, try it out in different scenarios. Think about the various potential cases. Will the design work out in print? What if you choose to start a product line later? Does your web design have an impact on the site visitors you expect to receive?

The best thing to do here is to go through the entire process multiple times and also make a couple of different color schemes so that just in case one color palette fails to meet your requirements; you will already have a Plan B in place.

  1. Brainstorm Whenever Needed

When you know the right place where you should look, finding visually pleasing color palettes is not that big a struggle. Besides, there are plenty of online tools available today to help you create beautiful website color schemes effectively. All you need to do is a bit of brainstorming and market research when needed.

Read More: A Layman’s Guide to Choosing Website Color Schemes

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