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E-Commerce Website Design - Color Choices
From all elements that you can find in an E-Commerce web design, colors play a quite important role. Color, if used correctly, can give a strong emotional impact to your customers, which will influence their decision to purchase something from your online store.
When it comes to colors, most online store owners usually only choose them because "they look good" or because their designer is the one who picked those colors combination for them.
Your online store's colors can show much information about your brand and products to all your visitors. That is why make sure to pick your colors combination carefully.
In fact, color is one of the most powerful elements in your E-Commerce web design. It even comes with usability, content, user interface, or even your products and brand. Any first-time visitor will probably see your website's color scheme first before anything else.
Before we talk about colors in a more detailed manner, let's look some points about their usage first:
•Do not use too many colors in one combination
The simpler is better. Do not combine too many colors at once. If you use more than 5 colors, it will become too hard for people to absorb the aesthetic of your site.
•Use a proper color combination
Not all colors combinations can be used. Two or more colors that look perfect when used together are called complementary colors. On the other hand, if two or more colors used together and produce a strong effect, it's called color pairs. For a safe play, you can combine cold or neutral colors as complementary colors for your E-Commerce web design.
Sometimes, a strong pair of colors can be used to make your banner looks attractive, but use it carefully. Too strong and you may confuse your visitors instead.
What is Color Theory?
Color theory is a set of principles that used to create a harmonious color combination. You can use these color combinations for every kind of designs. It may come in a form of color wheels, triangles, diagrams, or another kind of form that can be used by designers to understand how to combine colors and create pleasing palettes.
You can divide colors into several categories:
1. Neutral colors
Neutral here means without or lack of colors. Neutral is unsaturated colors. Usually, you can combine neutral colors with any kind of colors.
•Black
Black is an elegant yet strong color. That is why you can not overuse black for your E-Commerce web design. When used too much, black can give off arrogance feeling and unpleasant on the eyes. It probably the best to be used as a secondary color.
If you want to use black as a background color, try to use a color with a shade of gray for the text instead of white. It will create a softer effect and easy on the eyes.
•Gray
This is a color that shows humility, neutral and respect. However, it also can cause a feeling of old, especially for older people.
Gray also a good choice for a complementary or second color. You also can use it to show your breadcrumbs in a subtle way.
•White
White colors bring a calm and safe feeling. It is also one of the most used colors in the website design. If you browse sites on the internet, most of them use white as their background color. Of course, there is a good reason why they do that.
Site's elements will look better when you leave a decent amount of white space around them. They will look good and tidier.
With the white background, you do not need to use flashy colors for your site's elements. They can pop naturally with a white background.
•Brown
This color can show stability and makes your online shop looks reliable. Brown also the color of Earth, which means it is a natural and organic color. It brings the feeling of trust and friendliness. If you want to use it as a second or complementary color, you can try to use a darker shade of brown. If you want to use it as a background, the beige shade will work better.
2. Warm colors
Warm colors are the colors of sun or fire, like yellow, red and orange. Most people consider warm colors as energetic and vivid colors. Warm colors can make the surrounding space seems bigger and inviting. It gives more stimulation to people feeling, and when you see them, you will feel warmer inside.
Warm colors usually used to convey happy messages and good energy. This is also the reason why most restaurants out there use warm colors like red and yellow as their logo and color theme.
•Red
Red is a quite powerful color. This color has a stimulating effect, can increase blood pressure and breathing rate, and can trigger intense emotion like love, *****ion, and passion.
•Pink
Pink symbolizes feminity, relationship, and love. It brings relaxing effect, but you need to use it for a proper audience. So, only use it if you are sure it can bring a positive reaction from your visitors.
•Yellow
Yellow is the sun's color. It brings optimism and happiness. A different shade of yellow can trigger a different kind of feeling. For example, lighter shade of yellow triggers weakness while a darker one can trigger richness.
Yellow also commonly used as the color for action buttons. But, keep in mind that yellow is a strong color for the eyes. Use it too much, and you may make your web's visitors feel sick.
•Orange
Orange contains all the advantages you can get from both red and yellow colors. In another word, it can trigger strong feeling like red, but still bringing soothing effect like yellow.
3. Cool colors
While warm colors remind us of sun and warm, cool colors remind us of water, sea, sky, or even snow. Cool colors can bring peace and relaxation. Cool colors include blue, purple and green.
Blue is the primary color in the cool color spectrum. You can use cool colors in your E-Commerce web design to show some professionalism.
•Blue
Besides professionalism, blue also the color of calmness and reliability. Of course, a different shade of blue brings a different kind of meaning too.
Light baby blue color brings a feeling of carefree and innocence, that is why this color often used for the online baby shop. Blue with turquoise shade can give a fresh and healthy feeling.
•Purple
Purple is associated with spirituality, creativity, and luxury. It is also considered as the strongest color in the cool color spectrum. Purple also can trigger secrecy feeling, that is why it is usually used as a secondary color.
In recent days, purple also considered as a fashionable color, thus often used in the fashion E-Commerce store.
•Green
When seeing green color, people usually will automatically think about nature and trees, right? Green also get associated with health, money, and luck.
Green also one of the color most people used for their action buttons, because it's positive meaning and ability to encourage people to make an action.
Conclusion
As a basic rule, do not use more than three main colors in your E-Commerce web design if possible, in order to make it cleaner and simpler.
This is the last article for the E-Commerce website design series. Everyone has their own standard for a beautiful E-Commerce web design. However, a good design must be clear, simple, high usability, able to show the best part of your product and brand, and of course, user-friendly too!
This article also published at limecommerce
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Anything, just not white letters on a black background.
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But white on any dark background except black will give an eye catchy effect.
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Yes it does!
Originally Posted by charu
But white on any dark background except black will give an eye catchy effect.
Yes it does but probably suitable for only those sites who deal in expensive, premium products.
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