Ask yourself these questions to evaluate the effectiveness of your website's colour scheme.

· Does your website's colour scheme influence your visitors to make purchases?
· Do the colours you use on your website evoke in your visitors a desire to delve deeper into your website and linger over content?
· Are you using website colours effectively to convey specific ideas about your company's professionalism and commitment to customers?

Basics of Color Psychology

The color scheme of your website can greatly influence your web visitors to:
buy your products or services develop a sense of trust with your company actively seek out and enjoy reading information on your website

While emotional responses vary from culture to culture, researchers such as Choku Akashi, have been able to determine some generalities about the ways people respond to color.

Here's a quick guide to the general emotions that colors can evoke:

White: sense of newness, awakened interest, and openness to new ideas
Red: inspires action, decisiveness, and evokes desires
Yellow: cheerfulness, hopefulness
Orange: excitement, vibrancy, and warmth
Blue: trust, calmness, stability, and peacefulness
Green: elegance, balance, harmony, peacefulness, and freshness
Black: somber, introspective, withdrawing, suspicion
Brown: down-to-earth, casual, reliable, quiet
Grey: non-committed, neutral
Purple: subdued, mysterious, spiritual

Colors that Sell

Vivid shades of red and orange are very effective influences on encouraging people to purchase your products or services.

Do use vivid shades of red or orange as part of sales graphics, or as borders around sales promotion text. See Larry Chase's Web Digest for Marketers website for a good example of how to use red to enhance page headers.

Do not use garish shades of red or orange or your content will be perceived as pure hype, and your website will appear amateurish.

Do use vivid red and orange colors sparingly and in a manner that maintains visual balance with other colors that you use on your website.

Yellow is another evocative color. It is an excellent color to use in areas of your website that provide helpful resources to your visitors. This color encourages people to feel positive and hopeful. It can also be a very welcoming color.

Blue is another influential color that is very effective on websites. You can use blue as an accent for borders, margin colors, or as part of graphics to help your website connote a sense of trustworthiness and calmness. This is particularly effective for new businesses.

Green is also an effective color to connote stability and balance. Consequently, many businesses in the financial industry use shades of green on their websites.

Again, the key here is to use vivid but not glaring shades of this color to evoke positive emotional responses in your web visitors.

Colors that Hurt Sales

Which colors should you avoid using on a website that sells products or services?

Try to avoid the use of colors schemes that connote inaction, mystery, or passive feelings. These color schemes include:

grey
brown
black
purple

Please note that you can achieve effective results with the above colors by using them as accents to more evocative colors such as red, yellow, blue or orange.

For example,you can use black as a border accent to draw attention to highly evocative colors such as red, yellow or blue. However, if you use black to accent more passive colors such as brown or purple, you will find that your web visitors will not be as inspired to purchase your products or services.