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.