Color is undoubtedly the essential means to touch the emotions of your website visitors. It is a non-verbal communication and creates a physical and emotional reaction of the viewers. Colors are able to set the right tone and carry a necessary message for visitors. Colors can calm or excite, arouse plenty of feelings and stimulate to actions. Color is extremely powerful.

When choosing a color scheme for a website, it is important to do it right, guided by the main principles of the color theory and of course, follow professional advices. In this article I intended to cover the most important aspects of color, the main principles of combining colors, its meaning in web design as well as symbolic meaning. Also, you will see some good examples of well designed websites divided according to the prevailing color as well as get familiar with some useful tips from professional designers as to using colors effectively when creating a website.

So, let's start discovering the magic of color…

Color theory: the main principles. Learning to combine colors

The people, who are not closely familiar with the web design main principles, choose colors for their websites according to their own taste and end up with the colors that just look good in combination with each other. It is great if you have a good eye and you feel intuitively what color scheme to choose for a website. But of course, all men can't be good at it. So, for all those who are not sure what colors to combine for the website, I would recommend to learn the basics of color theory – it is very clear and easy to understand.

One of the most useful issues to start with is the Color Wheel.

A little bit of history: The color wheel was invented by Isaak Newton in 1666. He took the bar of colors created by the passage of light through a prism and transformed it into a segmented circle, where the size of each segment differed according to his calculations of its wavelength and of its corresponding width in the spectrum.

Source: sustland.umn.edu

The color wheel is an indispensable attribute of many designers and artists all over the world. This great tool is a perfect proof of the theory that the ingenious is always simple. The color wheel allows you to pick the colors that are harmonious together. The wheel consists of 6 basic colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. In addition to the basic colors, we have extra colors (mixes of the basic).

So, to find a right harmonious color scheme, you need to use any two colors opposite each other on the color wheel, any three colors equally spaced around the color wheel forming a triangle or any of four colors that form a rectangle (two pairs of colors opposite each other). Color schemes remain harmonious regardless of the rotation angle.

Primary Colors

There are three primary colors: Red (#ff0000 in HTML or #f00 in CSS), Yellow (#ffff00 in HTML or #ff0 in CSS) and Blue (#0000ff in HTML or #00f in CSS). We cannot get them by mixing any other color. The other extra colors can be formed by combining of these three colors. If you mix two of the primary colors, you will have a secondary color.

Secondary colors

There are also three of them: Orange (#ff9900 in HTML or #f90 in CSS), Green (#00ff00 in HTML or #0f0 in CSS) and Purple (#ff00ff in HTML or #f0f in CSS). You can get them by mixing red and yellow (orange), yellow and blue (green) and blue and red (purple).

Tertiary colors

To get one of tertiary colors you need to mix one primary color and one secondary color together. The opportunities for tertiary colors are endless.

Complementary colors

Complementary colors are the ones that are located directly across each other on the color wheel: red and green, blue and orange, purple and yellow. In combination with each other they compose a striking contrast. Such color combinations are usually used for standing out some elements on the website. For example, if you have an orange background and some blue elements on it, the blue items will be almost blinding.

Analogous colors

These colors are located next to each other on the color wheel. They usually look extremely good together, but absolutely quiet. Use such color combinations when you need your visitors to feel comfortable while looking at your website pages.

There are plenty of color groups that refer to various aspects of color, i.e. warm colors, cool colors, neutral colors to name a few.

Colors in different cultures: symbolism

When choosing a color scheme for your website, you should obligatory take into account the fact that this or that color may have different meanings in different cultures. The cultural aspect for color symbolism can be very strong, so you need to be aware of how your audience views the colors. If you understand what you are saying with your website color scheme, you will avoid a huge mistake.

Let's find out what some colors mean in different cultures:

Red

• China: the color of brides, Good luck, celebration, summoning • Cherokees: triumph, success • India: purity • South Africa: mourning color • Eastern: worn by brides, joy (in combination with white) • Western: excitement, love, passion, stop • USA : christmas (with green), Valentine’s day (with white) • Hebrew : sacrifice, sin • Japan : life • Christian : sacrifice, passion, love • Feng Shui : Yang, Fire, good luck, respect, protection, vitality, money, recognition

Blue

• European : soothing, “something blue” bridal tradition • Cherokees : defeat, trouble • Iran : mourning, color of heaven and spirituality • China : immortality • Colombia : soap • Hinduism : the color of Krishna • Judaism : holiness • Christianity : Christ’s color • Catholicism : color of Mary’s robe • Middle East : protection • Worldwide : ’safe’ color • Feng Shui : Yin, water, calm, love, healing, relaxation, peace, trust, adventure, exploration • Western: Sadness, depression, conservative, bridal tradition, corporate, “something blue”

Yellow

• European : happiness, hope, joy, cowardice, hazards, weakness • Asia : imperial, sacred • China : royalty, nourishing • Egypt : mourning • Japan : courage • India : merchants • Buddhism : wisdom • Feng Shui : Yang, Earth, auspicious, sunbeams, warmth, motion

Orange

• European : autumn, harvest, creativity • Netherlands : favorite color (House of Orange) • Ireland : protestants (religious) • USA : halloween (with black), cheap goods • Hinduism : saffron (peachy orange) is a sacred color • Feng Shui : Yang, Earth, purpose, strengthens concentration

Brown

• Colombia : discourages sales • Australian Aboriginals : color of the land, ceremonial ochre • Feng Shui : Yang, Earth, industry, grounded

Green

• China : exorcism, green hats indicate a man’s wife is cheating on him • Japan : life • Islam : hope – the cloak of the prophet was thought to be green, virtue – only those of perfect faith can wear green • Ireland: symbol of the entire country, Catholics • European/USA : spring, new birth, go, safe, environmental awareness, Saint Patrick’s Day, Christmas (with red) • USA : money • Western: spring, new birth, go, Saint Patrick’s Day, Christmas (with red) • India: Islam • Feng Shui : Yin, Wood, growing energy, refreshing, nurturing, balancing, harmony normalize, healing, health, peaceful, calming

Purple

• Thailand : mourning (widows) • European : royalty • Catholicism : death, mourning, crucifixion • Feng Shui : Yin, physical and mental healing, spiritual awareness

White

• European : marriage, angels, doctors, hospitals, peace • Japan : mourning, white carnation symbolizes death • China: mourning, death, • India : unhappiness • Eastern : funerals • Feng Shui : Yang, metal, death, ghosts, mourning, ancestal spirits, poise, confidence

Black

• European : mourning, funerals, death, rebellion, cool, restfulness • China : color for young boys • Thailand : bad luck, evil, unhappiness, • Judaism : unhappiness, bad luck, evil • Australian Aboriginals : color of the people, ceremonial ochre • Feng Shui : Yin, water, money, career success, income, stability, emotional protection, power, bruises, evil

The meaning of colors. A varicolored showcase

A visitor's immediate opinion as to you and your offers is formed right after he sees your website for the first time. And this immediate opinion is formed not because your offer is brilliant or your products are great… When your web page appears to the visitor, the colors you have used go to work on the subconscious of your visitors. It happens because we all react on colors intuitively and psychologically. If the color scheme is chosen right for grabbing your audience's attention, a huge part of work has already been done.

Let's see what feelings each color can evoke as well as look at some ready-made website solutions selected as examples for each color.

Red

is mostly associated with boldness, excitement and desire. Red is the color of love, strength, power, energy, leadership and excitement. It is a strong color, and you should be aware of some its negative associations, i.e. danger, alarms, traffic lights, etc.

Blue

means patience, peace, tranquility, trustworthiness, love, stability. It is one of the most beloved colors, especially by men. It is associated with stability and depth, professionalism, trust and honor.

A Stunning Blue Color Scheme for a Blog

Yellow

is the color that mostly associated with liveliness. It is energetic and gives the feeling of happiness. Also, it associates with curiosity, amusement, joy, intelligence, brightness, caution, etc.

A Yellow Website Brighter than Sunshine

Orange

means cheerfulness and creativity. It can be associated with friendliness, confidence, playfulness, courage, steadfastness, etc.

An Attractive and Friendly Orange Solution

Purple

traditionally associates with power, nobility and wealth. Wisdom, royalty, independence, nobility, luxury, ambition, dignity, magic and mystery.

A Mysterious Design in Purple

Green

is the color of harmony, nature, healing, life, food and health. Also, it is often associated with money.

A Stylish and Well Balanced Green Design

Brown

is the color of relaxation and confidence. Brown means earthiness, nature, durability, tribal, comfort, reliability, etc. It can be thought of sophisticated, solid and conventional.

An Excellent Brown Colored Portfolio

Grey

gives the sense of seriousness, conservatism and traditionalism. It can provoke the feeling purity and innocence. It can be associated with security, reliability, intelligence, modesty, dignity, maturity, solid, practical, old age, sadness, quality, boring, practicality, professional, durability, quiet, gloominess. In combination with orange, grey looks fantastic and awakens the sense of perfection.

A Creative Portfolio in Grey

Pink

expresses tenderness, romance, femininity, truth, passivity, good will, emotional healing, care, peace, calming, affection, emotional maturity, nurturing, sweet tasting, sweet smelling, ethereal, delicacy, etc.

A Wonderful Pink Web Solution

Black

is a stylish and elegant color associated with power, sophistication, formality, health, etc. Black is an excellent technical color and helps to add some mystery to your design. But if you don't want your website provoke depressing feelings, avoid using black over a large area. On the other hand, if you make a black background, it can enhance perspective and depth. Black is great to use for art and photography websites to help other colors to vibrate.

A Black Colored Business 3D Solution

White

White is associated with purity, simplicity, fresh, goodness, innocence easy, cleanliness, etc. This color is great to use for a background or accent color, because it highlights other colors.

A Clean White Web Design

Conclusion: some useful tips

As a conclusion, there are some useful pieces of advice that will help you in choosing a good color scheme for your website. These little tips are widely used by professional web designers.

1. If you wish your text content to be easily readable, choose contrasting colors. It is important to make contrast between the text and background.
2. Use less colors. Don't make your website to look like a circus. For the best impact you can use one color on headlines and another color (the complementary one) for the text.
3. Use enough colors. Use less, but enough. If you use too little colors, you risk to make your website boring. Or use little colors but just use other means to underline the elements in that case.
4. If you need to attract the visitor's eye, use intense colors. But be careful, as If the color scheme is too intense, it attracts the eye in too many directions, and the techniques will lose its effectiveness.
5. Derive inspiration from nature: you can find really great complementary color schemes.

Useful related links:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_theory
• http://joehallock.com/edu/COM498/index.html
• http://www.sibagraphics.com/colour.php
• http://www.bwwsociety.org/feature/color.htm
• http://colortheory.liquisoft.com/
• http://webdesign.about.com/od/color/Designing_With_Color.htm
• http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-basics/color-theory/

That's all for now. We hope you will find this article useful and look forward to your comments.

The goal of any great website is to provide quality content for its readers and clients, though no website can be truly successful if it cannot provide the content in a timely manner. How much time is acceptable isn’t always up to you though. It’s in the eyes of the beholder, hence the readers.

If you have a flash based website that is media heavy, and your users knows is, they will probably be ok waiting a minute or two while your page loads. Though, if on the other hand you have a mostly text based website and it takes two minutes to load, there is 99.99% chance the person will not wait. These days, people want information and websites to be practically instantaneous.

Like most people, you will have a mostly text content with many a few images, javascript and flash thrown in for effect, but assuming your not a media website your readers will want a fast loading and fast performing website.

Below you’ll find the best of the best tools on the internet to profile your website. One query at a time. And best of all, they are all free (as in beer)!  Hit the jump to read on…

This first tool is one which you will probably want to check first.

Pingdom Tools

It gives you a complete profile, file by file which your page loads. This will let you know exactly which files, javascripts or images are slowing down your page. You might even find out that your host is slow. You never know what surprises you’ll find.

For example, using just this tool alone I brought my main websites loading time down from a whopping 13-16 seconds to 3-6 seconds! What what wrong? I found out that my site was still loading a few old plugins and that two or three other plugins where creating this huge delay!

Though one tool is never good enough. Let’s look at some other available tools to get a nice average time and to make sure the load times are similar.

InternetSuperVision.com

This won’t give you a line by line profile, but it will give you load times from many sources. You can use this to compare times with what you observe and with what you received from Pingdom Tools!

SearchMetrics.com

This great little website speed tool will tell you the time it takes on the current connection to load your page AND estimates on how long it will take to load on several other connection types including: dsl, cable and T1!

It also tells you how many images, java scripts and CSS files it found and how large each is (and the totals). That way you know exactly what is eating up the most bandwith.

WebsiteOptimization.com’s Web Page Optimizer

This is probably the most detailed free analysis tool you will ever find. It gives you a breakdown for each and every file type and even gives some pretty good recommendations.

Even on my hand made, extremely small site IMRList.com I was told to shrink the size, compressed my images and javascripts and a few other things. You’ll learn a lot from the recommendations on this site.

You’ll mostly learn how to make a well optimized website that is standards complaint! Double the awesome since this tool is free!

Here’s something even better though: the site can accept a URL to check for you but it can also take code. So you can take your (X)HTML, plug it right into their site and POOF! It will tell you if you need to improve anything.

WebSlug.info Single Page Test

This great very small tool loads your page in an iframe and tests how long it takes to load. Nothing special here except that it’s small and works very fast. Good for getting a quick performance measurement.

Don’t be put off that it’s a .info though! It’s one fast and accurate site!

Uptrends.com

This site is similar to Pingdom’s tool, but less flashy. Though it will give you practically the same results.

OctaGate

Quick site with very detailed results about when each connection starts and stops per http request.

WebWait

This is a very simple tool. Enter in your address and it will load up and time your page in an iframe. But it’s not like all the others. It also has a very useful interval feature. So you can keep testing a site over and over to get more accurate results.

You can set the number of times it tests and at what interval. Very good for repeated testing so that you don’t have to keep reloading a testing website.

WebToolHub

This is another simple tool. This is better suited to testing your servers than just your websites. So it’s a good tool to find out exactly what’s slowing your page down: your code or the server!

iWebTools

If you have multiple domains or sites to test, this is the tool for you. It’s quick, easy and gives results for multiple domains. Just enter them into the large textarea box and hit Test!

Bonus: Google Speed Tracer!

This is the hardest tool to get working. It’s free though. First you have to download Google Chrome. But not any ol’ Google Chrome. A special developers edition! But wait! That’s not it!

After you have the special version you have to open it up using special modifiers. After you do that you can download the extension and start using it properly.

Once you have it though, it will give you some very realistic statistics and graphs all about the current page you are browsing. And oh yes, it is very pretty … and useful too!

If you have any special tools that you use to profile your websites performance, let us know in the comments!