Research: Website Design – Colour

Colour is an important aspect of many website because “research has shown that it has the power to alter the physiology and mental states of a person” (Fitzvillafuerte). Viewers can use colour to get an idea about the website within the first couple of seconds of viewing it. Therefore colour is an important decision regarding website design.

Pastel colours I may choose to use

As previously investigated, parenting sites commonly use pastel colours – which is something that I find appealing. It is an easy visual cue regarding site content. Blue and pink are used often because they are stereotypical baby boy and baby girl colours – for example, Plunket and PBS/parents use blues

Wpmudev recommends using three main colours in a website, because the more colours used the harder it is to create harmony, or make the site look consistent.

They also recommend using the 60 – 30 – 10 ratio rule.
• 60% of a website should be a primary colour – it is safer for this to be neutral (white, grey, beige) because it goes with anything.
• 30% should contrast with the 60% to “create a visually striking effect”
• 10% is an accent to complement the primary or secondary site

The above sites somewhat follow this rule, however todaysparent (below) doesn’t. The above sites look a little bit boring, as they only use blues. I prefer todaysparent site – I don’t think it looks too unorganised or inconsistent, I think certain colours correspond to certain categories which is a nice visual categorisation. It does look a bit busy when hovering over the main menu – because each is a different colour.

I hadn’t come across this website before, and I quite like the design of it. Ads are incorporated nicely into the site, rather than looking out of place, and it uses white space nicely. It doesn’t look too complicated to create using HTML/CSS.

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I think I want to do a bit more research, and do planning about the design of my sites, before I choose the final colours I’ll use.