What kind of emotion does your website convey? At a glance, what kind of feeling does it give you? If you take a quick look at your website and it makes you feel happy or excited, chances are everyone that comes to your website are experiencing the same thing.

Colors have a dramatic impact on your audience, so you have to make sure you’re making the right selections to fit the marketing goals and the audience.

Here are some real world examples:

• www.beachcombersnw.com: This site looks great. The first thing I think of is vacation, wind and relaxation. You get this feeling because it uses light blues and shades of tan which often symbolize sky and sand.
• www.yeahyeahoutloud.com: Every time I see this site I think about crayons and drawing. The topic of this website is Children’s Self Esteem, so it makes sense that you would have a vibrant design like this. It makes the experience fun, but educational at the same time.
• www.dwassoc.com: This site is focused towards business men and women and uses various shades of blue. The site has a professional feel, but the colors can create conflicting emotions such as cool and calm or depressing and sad.

You have to be careful when selecting colors for a Web site design. Your strategic color choices will change the way your audience translates the site.

Getting results with color is a key ingredient in a sites design not just for web usability, but for marketing purposes as well.

How often have you come across a website that looks plain and lacks visual appeal? Maybe not so much anymore, but not too long ago Web developers around the world were whipping out websites left and right as fast as they could without thinking how visual elements play a role in a websites success.

Let’s put your site to the test. Go to your website and take a brief gander. Now, close your eyes for three seconds and then open them. What is the first thing your eyes are drawn to? Whatever the object may be, it is a focal point on your website. The focal point of this blog, for example, is the logo and the dark gray bar that goes across the top. These kinds of visual elements stand out from the rest and lead your sites visitors to different areas.

That’s why it’s important to think about how Web design affects Web usability. Something as simple as an effective color scheme can make or break Web conversions. Here’s a classic example of a website that’s living in the stone age. What I find interesting is that I can’t look at anything else but the moving yellow ad on the right hand side of the page. Every time I try and read something I’m drawn away by the in-your-face ad. These stand-out images and moving objects are very annoying to internet users out there, young and old alike.

Sometimes you get the itch to use that bright neon green and pink, but please I beg you stay away from anything that can be perceived as distracting. Otherwise, it’s almost a garauntee that you will lose potential customers.

Then why are so many people bad at it? Simple, they design their sites around what they want and what they think is best. Animated gif’s, blinking boxes, and neon colored text are older than “old school” Web development methods. We’re talkin’ prehistoric…come on people you can do better than that.

Fortunately for us, there’s a wonderfully odd site out there called Web Pages That Suck which highlights the worst of the worst and gives you a snippet or two as to why their so darn bad. Most websites are built with good intentions, but fail to meet their true objective, increase their customer base. You should take your time and think about what the sites purpose is and then browse around at sites like CSS Elite for examples of unique, high quality designs and layouts.

Not all sites are perfect, so you shouldn’t aim for a squeaky clean design the first time around.

Well crafted lines, objects, and graphical elements help bring each page on your site to life and careful planning of your sites structure will sum up to a great user experience. Object positioning is very very important. Understanding how pieces of the site interact with each other, is vital in developing a well put together website. A search box located somewhere towards the top right corner works better as opposed to being placed somewhere under the logo. Since the Web became public grounds, we have subconsciously decided that particular site elements will always be located in a certain location.

As a Web developer, if you break that mold and try something new, you’re likely to frustrate users. Remember, when you build a website that it’s not just a “website”, you’re building an experience for all kinds of users.