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.