Finding the Right Look and Feel
Colour can have a profound impact on your prospective buyers. The wrong colours can negatively impact your sales, while the right colours can trigger positive emotions motivating your visitors to buy from you.
Colour can affect how we feel and influence what we think. In general, bright bold colours tend to stir us up, while the softer pastel colours calm and relax us. Responses to colours can vary by age, gender and cultural background.
Colours will affect how a potential visitor reacts to your web site. Carefully select your colour scheme for your web site, web header, and ebook cover. Here are some guidelines to help you make good colour choices. Bear in mind that these are guidelines, and that there are no hard and fast rules. Just use common sense.
Consider your audience. For example, if your web site primarily targets men, then you will want to use strong, bold colours. If your target audience is women, then choose soft, pastel colours. If your focus is on children, choose bright, vibrant colours.
Choose colours that are appropriate for your web site's topic. For example, green may work well for web sites about starting a home business, making money, and reducing debt.
Keep the number of colours down to two or three, and no more. Make sure that all of the colours you use work well together and do not clash. Use an program which will start with a base colour and then present you with a number of colour co-ordinated options - either contrasting or complimentary. Such an application will allow you to build a colour scheme in which all the colours, or shades of colour, sit well with each other, and help you avoid such colour no-no's as red on green, for example.
Communicate your message with easy-to-read text. In general there are three types of font - serif, sans serif and decorative.
Serif fonts are those like, Times New Roman which have rather detailed end points.
These fonts may be difficult to read on screen,
especially at smaller font sizes, and are usually associated with traditional businesses and professions.
Sans serif fonts like Arial or Verdana have none of the detailed end points and are much smoother, cleaner and easier to read,
even at smaller font sizes.
They are usually associated with more modern, technological businesses.
Decorative fonts include those such as script fonts which make type look like handwriting, and should be used very sparingly in a web page.
While decorative fonts look good to a lot of people, you should be aware that the browser that displays the web page uses the fonts that are
installed on the computer on which its running.
WARNING: This means that if you design a web page which uses an obscure decorative font, it will only
display in that font if the web site visitor who's viewing your page also happens to have installed that font. In fact, the range of fonts which
are guaranteed to look the same on anyone's computer is very short indeed (limited to those fonts which are installed with the users operating system).
For this reason, we would urge you to choose common fonts such as Arial or Verdana (on Windows systems).
Use colours for your text that contrast with the background
colour so your text is readable. For example, a dark font on a light background is easy to read.
Choose your colours carefully
Choose your colours carefully
Choose your colours carefully
Choose your colours carefully
- Red - Action, energy, strength, passion, fire, heat, power, attention-getting. Can also mean love and romance. A strong masculine colour. Red is a good colour for a call-to-action. Red is cheerfulness, excitement, and warmth. Pink is a soft version of red. It is most associated with romance, calming affect; a feminine colour.
- Blue - Confidence, travel, freedom, truth, professionalism, wealth and power. Also tranquility, dependable, cooperation, comfort, loyalty and security. It is one of the most calming colours and is associated with the sky and the sea, intelligence, reassurance, and trust.
- Green - Money, wealth, prosperity, calm, health, growth, freshness, soothing, sharing, and responsiveness. Green symbolizes spring, renewal, and fertility.
- Orange - Health and vitality, autumn, fire, confidence, friendliness, cheerfulness, warmth, excitement and energy. Vibrant and warm, orange is associated with autumn and the earth.
- Yellow - Light, purity, understanding, caution, brightness, intelligence, joy, organization. Yellow often represents sunshine, warmth, light, energy and happiness.
- Purple - Dignity, sophistication, creativity. Deep purple is associated with royalty and richness, while lavender is associated with romance and nostalgia.
- Brown - Credibility, stability, the hearth, home, the earth, wood, comfort and strength. Brown can be used as a neutral or a warm colour.
- Black - Space, night, authority, dramatic, classy, committed, serious, power, elegance, and sophistication.
- White - Purity, perfection, fresh, cleanliness, goodness, and spirituality. While white represents life and marriage in Western cultures, it represents death and sorrow in Eastern cultures.
- Grey - A conservative colour which symbolizes stability, security, maturity and reliability.