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The use of colour in website design plays an important part in how people perceive your business. It’s a psychological factor that is often overlooked.  If the colour scheme is too “busy”, visitors will find it uncomfortable to read on screen, and it may even give the impression of “amateurism” to your visitors.

Its best to keep the colour scheme and layout as simple as possible. As they say in the advertising business – “white space can sell”. If you have lots of white space, your site looks less cluttered and is easier on the eye. If you try and make your site look like the front page of a tabloid newspaper, people won’t stay around long enough to read your content. Websites are not newspapers, and so have to be designed around the medium. This is why even websites of tabloid newspapers are totally different in design and layout to their printed publications.

Unless you are planning some sort of entertainment site designed to appeal to the young, we recommend staying away from the “whizz-bang” approach to websites. These are those sites that seem to be littered with all sorts of animated gadgets and gizmos. These can be highly distracting and, again, can cause discomfort to site visitors. Flash animation should be carefully thought out, and must have a purpose. What you don’t want to do is to simply have glaring graphics all over your site for the sole purpose of showing the world how proficient your website designer is in the art of flash animation.

Flash advertising banners are effective for drawing attention, but try and use them to draw attention to key areas of your site. Many people, in an attempt to make a little money from advertising, allow their site  to be littered with flash animated banners from a whole host of unrelated sites. Not only does this policy disrupt your carefully thought out colour scheme, but it is also the most effective method of getting people to LEAVE your site by clicking on one of those “flashy” ads.

If you really feel the need to have paid advertising on your website (which is a good thing if done correctly), be sure to set your own rules. Make sure that third-party advertising conforms to your website colour scheme, and whatever you do DON’T put third party ads on your home page. Remember, you want people to look around your site, and not to be taken off to an advertiser’s site the moment they reach your home page.

If you have a corporate colour scheme as part of your overall corporate identity, try to incorporate that scheme into your site. If it doesn’t quite work (due to technical limitations), a good designer will still be able to give your site the look and feel of your corporate colour scheme by using graphic elements within the site pages. The general rule is, if you have more than six colours in your website, you’ve probable gone over the top. If you need colour variety, its best to stick with a few key colours, and then add shades of those colours to highlight important content areas.

 

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