Melbourne web designer

How to Boost Your Sales Through These Colour Psychology Tips

Posted on by Mario

web design tips

I have to admit, as a person, I’m not into colourful things. I always love black and black is the only colour I love. However, in the business world, it doesn’t work like that. Colour is the face of a business that represents its “personality” and “uniqueness”. If you are a business owner, I’m sure you know the meaning of colour for your business, especially when it comes to web design or logo design. Colour is the characteristic of your business that can differentiate you from other companies in the same industry. The set of colours used in business may be the same and identical; however, there is the psychology behind the meaning of colours and depending on what you choose; it can determine your business success. For that reason, if you are just starting out a business and building your website, you should make use of this colour psychology that can help you attract more customers and increase sales. How? Keep reading this article to find out!

What is colour psychology?

Before we dive deep into more information about colour psychology, let’s start with the definition first. Colour psychology is the science of how colour affects human behaviour. Although this lacks scientific evidence to back up the theory that colours affect human behaviour, there are key facts of colour theory that cannot be denied. In a peer reviewed journal article, Satyendra Singh determined that it takes a mere 90 seconds for a customer to form an opinion about a product and 62-90% of that interaction is determined by the colour of the product alone.

Where should you use colour?

Colours are omnipresent. They are used everywhere. For that reason, you need to understand where you should use the colours for your business and since we are talking about colour use in web design; you should use the colour scheme of your website that includes the tint of headline type, backgrounds, popups, borders, hero graphics and buttons.

Use the right colour in the proper way

Colour is tricky sometimes. Each colour has different meanings and effects. That’s why you should use it properly, at the right time for the right purpose and the right audience. For example, your business is selling toys for kids, your ideal colour scheme would be bright yellow, bright green, bright blue and a little bit of a red for some important part like contact details to make sure the buyers find them easily. If you are selling beauty products focused for women (yes, skincare stuff can also work for men, but that’s not the point in this example), then the colour scheme that works well for your products is a set of purple, soft pink, light purple and a little bit of white for the text can work too. However, keep in mind that it also depends on your products. If your beauty products are from the same brand with the same colour and let’s say the product packaging’s main colour is blue, then you can’t use colours like pink or purple. Use blue and expand its colour scheme with blue as the main focus colour so you can adjust your product well to the design. If blue is the main colour, you can use a set of dark blue, light blue and white. Doing this will help you maintain consistency for your brand and help your audience recognise you.

Colour and its effects

Now we get to the part where colour has its meaning and effects on other people. Colours have direct or indirect impacts on each person who sees that. These are the meanings of colours in general:

  • Black means mystery, elegance, death, evil, power, mourning
  • Blue means sadness, calm, loyalty
  • Green means abundance, nature, freshness
  • Yellow means happiness, concentration, hope
  • Red means passion, anger, danger, love
  • White means purity, cleanness, innocence
  • Purple means royalty, luxury, wealth, sophistication
  • Cream means elegance, purity
  • Grey means conservative, formality

Ever came into a room and immediately felt relaxed? Maybe a place like Spa can remind you of the feeling of relaxation and freshness. Perhaps the place is coloured in green, blue and a little bit of white? Yes, colour has THAT kind of effect on people. For that reason, business owners make use of colour psychology to determine which colour is suitable for their business and values. Remember, colour matters because your business matters; therefore, choose wisely.

Digital Hospitality: 4 Ways Web Hosting Affects the Quality of Your Website

Posted on by Mario

web development tips

Prime real estate space is highly valuable. This is why a plot of land of certain size in a certain area could be worth 10 times as much as another plot of land with a same size but in a less popular area. For new families embarking on a new beginning, a plot of land in a good neighborhood surrounded by good schools and good hospitals would be considerably more attractive than a plot of land in a lousy, remote neighborhood, making the former considerably more expensive. For businesses, the amount of traffic around and proximity to public attractions could weigh in your favor.

What happens though when this issue of space shifted into the digital world as online businesses are now the norm instead of the exception? You might think that the issue of where the website is located doesn’t really matter but it actually, just in a wholly different way. In the world of web development, businesses are so hung up on designing the perfect website that the discussion of where that website should be hosted isn’t a priority but I’m here to outline some arguments on why that needs to change.

Great hosts aren’t just for Airbnb

In this year alone, the Facebook family of apps, including Facebook-owned Instagram and WhatsApp, suffers from several different outages, cutting off access to their billions of users. If you’re not among those billions of people, all the power to you but for those that rely on those services on a daily basis, these outages are highly infuriating because they were entirely unexpected. If there was maintenance and people were alerted ahead of time, they might’ve been more receptive.

I’m absolutely certain that Facebook as a company opts to use the best hosting option available for their servers but in the world of web development, even the best is far from perfect. Of course, with the number of users in the billions and where security threats are a constant, Facebook is a very extreme example but it does highlight the importance of web hosting when it comes to online businesses. The quality of your website isn’t just decided by the website itself; your choice of web hosting will also have a measurable impact on the quality of your website.

Website load speed

Let’s say you’re about load a shipment of boxes from a warehouse to a truck. Obviously, the amount of time and work you’re going to have to make depend on the amount of boxes you have to move but it would also depend on how the boxes are going to be moved. Using a conveyor belt would be faster and requires less effort than if you’re going to have to carry the boxes one-by-one through a series of hurdles. In this analogy, the amount of boxes is the size and complexity of your website while how the boxes are moved is the access provided by your web host provider.

The amount of access and resource available to your website is dictated by your hosting plan. A cheap, shared hosting plan means that multiple websites are hosted in a single server and the amount of resource and computing power of that server has to be shared between those websites which means slower loading times. A dedicated server, physical or virtual, doesn’t suffer from this limitation but they’re also considerably more expensive, especially physical dedicated server. Keep in mind that for a simple portfolio website, a shared hosting option might be enough so try to balance these options with what you actually need.

Website uptime

No hosting option will be able to guarantee you 100% uptime, that’s just simply a statistical impossibility, but the good ones should at least be capable of guaranteeing 99% uptime. The numbers however, are just one piece of the puzzle, you also have to ensure that the web hosting provider you choose keep the unexpected downtime to a minimum and that you’re always given a heads up when a scheduled downtime is about to happen. You know how the saying goes, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.

Website security

There are two ways a website can be hacked, by invading the administrator section of a website and by invading the actual server where that website is hosted. The former is your responsibility but the latter is in the hands of whoever owns that server. There’s a type of service referred to as colocation hosting in which a business merely rents the server space where the server is located and the business is responsible for the managing of the server itself but typically, this is left to the hosting provider, which is why it’s imperative for you as a business to go with a provider that takes the issue of cybersecurity as serious as it should be.

Website scalability

For the forward thinking business owners, it’s typical for you to look at where you’d like your business to be 5, 10 years down the line. In the physical space, this means having a good foundation for your property so that when it comes a time for you to expand your wings, you could just simply expand the space you currently have now instead of having to hunt for a bigger location. This scalability issue is also present in the world of web development as as your business grows, you also have to contend with a bigger, more sophisticated website and more traffic.

If you think that going with a dedicated hosting option is a bit of overkill at this stage of your business, that’s completely in your discretion but you’d want to make sure that your hosting provider provides you with a seamless and easy way for you to upgrade and scale your website when the time comes. If you think that scaling in web development is easier than in the physical space, you’re right but it’s still quite a complicated process and you’d want to attach yourself to a hosting provider that knows what they’re doing.

 

Make Your Website Unforgettable with These Effective User Experience and Usability Tips for Web Design

Posted on by Mario

web design tips

Have you ever been in a relationship with someone that no matter how good looking, kind and rich the person is; you still felt empty as if it was not good enough? I have, and it was not that the person I was with was imperfect – I am also imperfect myself. However, something is definitely lacking. When you are dating, it is not just about looks, wealth and personality – it is the shared activity that must not be overlooked. Yes, when it comes to maintaining a relationship, shared activities are the ones making the relationship unforgettable because shared activities are done and experienced together in order to create meaningful memories that can always be remembered. Looking at this that way makes me believe that the same way of thinking can be applied to web design as well. When it comes to a website, it is not just about how it looks like, but it is more about how your website makes visitors feel. Did your website provide useful information? Did the visitors find what they are looking for on your website? Did the visitors feel encouraged to buy your products? Or did they feel happy after visiting your website? Whatever it is, at the end of the day, what matters most is how you make them feel and how unforgettable your website is to them. I know it seems hard to think that way because creating a magnificent website like that is almost impossible for businesses. Don’t worry! After months of researching, I found that it is also not impossible to create a website that is unforgettable for your website visitors with user experience and usability in mind. How? Keep reading to find out!

Make the website simpler but unique

Sometimes less is more and more is less – and it’s true. While the look and feel of your website is important, most visitors are not coming to your site to evaluate how stylish the design is. Instead, they are coming to your site to complete some action, or to find some specific piece of information. There are some unnecessary design elements that make the website too complicated to remember. Make it simpler and unique but not too plain. For example, colours. Colours if used and chosen properly can make your website easily recognised and remembered; however, don’t use too many colours for your website’s design as you might lose your business’ true colour if that happens. Also, the typefaces you choose should be legible at the very least. A common recommendation is to use a maximum of three different typefaces in a maximum of three different sizes. As for graphics, only use them if they can help a user complete a task or perform a specific function, not just randomly use them.

Organised visual elements

When you are optimising for usability and UX, there is only one goal that should be prioritised. The goal is to lead visitors to complete a desired action but in a way that feels natural and enjoyable. Visual hierarchy entails arranging and organising website elements so that visitors naturally gravitate toward the most important elements first. Ask your web designer to adjust the position, colour, or size of certain elements, so that you can structure your site in such a way that visitors will be drawn to those elements first.

Make navigation easy

Not many may notice this, but navigation is kind of the most important part of a website. It basically leads visitors to the right place on your website to encourage purchase decision (the end result). Having intuitive navigation on your site is crucial for making sure that visitors can find what they are looking for. For that reason, a visitor should be able to arrive on your site and not have to think extensively about where they should click next and clearly, moving from point A to point B should be as easy as possible.

When you have done the three tips above, everything would be so much easier later. Trust me, when you don’t have too many navigation options on a page, it will be easier for your visitors to find stuff on your website. When the colours used for your website ‘branding’ are balanced and unique, it would be easier for your visitors to notice your business colour patterns and in the future, your website would be easily recognised and always remembered.