Certain colours make evoke different emotions and it’s important to make sure you’re using colour psychology to your advantage. We’ve all heard that blue is supposed to be soothing and serene, but what else do we know about colours?

Whether you’re a young, up and coming fashion brand trying to connect with your audience or a legal firm wanting to gain trust, colours can help you to be perceived in that particular way. 

How? Read on to find out more…

Reds, Oranges and Yellows

Red is the universal colour of love and lust. But there’s a bit more to it than that. Red is exciting, it’s passion, danger, energy. In colour psychology, red is the most intense – meaning it can evoke the strongest emotions. Red is typically a good colour to use for a call to action button as it stands out and entices you to click it by subconsciously giving you that sense of excitement. 

Orange is creative. It’s success, enthusiasm, adventure. Orange is a good colour when you want to be playful, especially as it isn’t as demanding as red. This colour is used to add fun to websites, marketing materials and logos. 

Yellow, to no one’s surprise, revolves around sunshine. Sunshine brings happiness, positivity and optimism, just like the colour yellow. It’s the perfect colour if you’re wanting to bring a little positivity and care-free sunshine vibes to your brand.

Pinks and Purples

Pink is a popular colour for brands with quite a large female demographic. The colour pink itself revolves around femininity, playfulness and unconditional love. With such a bright and bold colour, it’s no surprise that fierce and typically feminine brands focus on pink.

The colour purple is connected with nobility, luxury and wisdom. However, it is more commonly used as an accent colour, as too much purple can be perceived as arrogant. Brands that want to be defined as luxury jump at the chance to use the colour purple, and it’s really no surprise.

Blues and Greens

Earlier I said that blue was calming. Let’s look into that. The colour blue is linked to the sea and sky. It brings emotions of harmony, peace, tranquillity. Not only that, but it’s trustworthy and stable. You’ll find a lot of brands use the colour blue to show that they’re reliable and safe. 

Tied to nature and money, green is the colour for growth, fertility and health. A lot of health brands will use green as their base colour to give you the sense of being connected with nature and your surroundings. Outdoor brands can also use this colour to entice a certain demographic, as green looks good and blends beautifully with the landscape. 

Greys, White and Black

Grey represents neutrality and balance. It’s simple and it’s easy. Grey is a good accent colour, as it’s hard to be put off by it and it can transition beautifully with almost any shade of colour.

White is pure, innocent and good. White is an extremely common background colour, as it keeps the website looking clean and minimal. It’s commonly paired with Greys and Blacks, but white can be paired with anything to clean up a website.

Symbolic of mystery, power and elegance, black is an extremely popular colour in retail. Typically contrasted against white, high end designers will use the colour black to showcase their premium products in a way that oozes sophistication. 

Now you’ve read a little bit about colour psychology, you can start to apply it to your brand. But don’t be afraid to think outside of the box, you don’t have to follow the rules.

Choose colours that represent you and your brand, and you can be sure that everything else will fall into place. Victoria Lilly Photography picks their colours beautifully, with their main accent colour being a gorgeous dusty pink. When your brand is about treasuring those precious family moments, the colour of unconditional love seems to be fitting!

Looking for a fab new website? Contact Newcastle Web Design today!
Email: hello@nclwebdesign.co.uk | Phone: 0191 603 1069

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Today, it’s an entirely different story. Smartphones and tablets have fundamentally altered the way we use the internet and ultra-fast broadband speeds have meant that the internet has moved away from luxury and towards utility. In today’s super-connected digital landscape, the design of your small business website is crucially important.

Check out our top three web design tips for the ultimate small business website:

Mobile-First Design

Web design has been trending towards responsive layouts for a number of years now, but most people still don’t know much about it. That’s for a reason, of course, because responsive web design means that your website displays natively on screens of all sizes and shapes. Whether you’re looking at a website on a smartphone or on your TV, responsive design ensures you’re getting a layout which fits your screen size perfectly.

Strong Content

I’m sure you’ve seen it across your travels on the internet, but there’s an increasing number of websites which abandon balance in favour of full screen videos, or image heavy websites. Those websites can look beautiful, but for the majority of us, a skilful blend of graphics, text and media is the best way forward. Bold, bright images paired with clear and compelling copy is a winning combination, especially when paired with video content.

Geo-targeted SEO

It’s no secret that search engine optimisation (SEO) is utterly crucial to ensuring that your business gets found on search engines like Google, but don’t fall into the trap many companies do. Instead of targeting big keywords like ‘web design’, instead target phrases like ‘web design north east’ or ‘web design Newcastle’. That way you’ll be narrowing down the amount of competition and finding local customers in the process.

There’s a lot more to good small business web design practice, but with these three elements in place, you can start to build a website that will not only attract online visitors, but turn them into paying customers. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with our friendly team if you need help setting up your small business website.

Looking for a fab new website? Contact Newcastle Web Design today!
Email: hello@nclwebdesign.co.uk | Phone: 0191 603 1069

The post 3 Pro Web Design Tips For UK SMEs & Startups appeared first on Newcastle Web Design.

Be Bold

Traditionally, website designers have usually gone with black text, but this is something you can expect to see changing in the coming year, especially for non-corporate websites. Design expert Boris Dzhingarov predicts 2018 will be the year of bigger, bolder or colourful fonts, which are more attractive to the reader’s eye and guaranteed to gain and hold their attention.

Engaging Content

In order to compete with other websites, it is essential that the content is engaging; one way of doing this is to introduce more imagery in the form of animation and retina-ready pictures. New technologies have made it possible for the average website owner or designer to create exciting visuals such as cinemagraphs and animations, so consider using these if you truly want to wow your audience.

Storytelling

Another trend that you can expect to see a lot of in 2018 is storytelling. Storytelling has become an increasingly popular means of engaging visitors, and it will help to keep them on your website longer, helping to reduce your bounce rate and improving your chances of making a conversion.

The best approach to this is to ensure that you create an interactive story that will draw your visitors in, and make sure to incorporate different means of engaging your visitors such as audio and video.

Responsive Design

Responsive web design is one trend that cannot afford to be ignored. There are now record numbers of people using mobiles and tablets to access the internet and this means that your website needs to be prepared for these visitors.

If you want to meet the demands of the modern day audience, who expect fast loading, accessible webpages while they are on the go, then a responsive website needs to be part of your digital business plan for 2018.

Clean Navigation

Website designers need to find ways of catering for the increasing amount of mobile visitors and this means implementing a cleaner navigation system. For this reason, a side menu, or a hamburger menu as it is sometimes known, is expected to become a popular option in the coming year.

Looking for a fab new website? Contact Newcastle Web Design today!
Email: hello@nclwebdesign.co.uk | Phone: 0191 603 1069

The post 5 Web Design Tricks To Wow Your Visitors appeared first on Newcastle Web Design.

People use the internet for almost every aspect of their lives and having a website that trumps the competition is crucial. But just having a website won’t do the job. Businesses need an engaging website that attracts and impresses visitors and, crucially, converts them into customers.

Having developed hundreds of websites for growing small businesses, here are some of our top tips…

Visual Hierarchy

First impressions count as much with a website as when going for a job interview. You want to impress and engage your customer from the first moment they arrive and one way to do with is to use visual hierarchy. Simply put, our eyes pay attention to a website in a certain manner.

By understanding this, you can make the most important parts of the website be located in the right place. For instance, if you want customers to click on a call to action button, then the visual hierarchy suggests that the top left hand corner of the site is the best place for this.

Easy To Read

Another element of the appearance of the website is getting everything to work harmoniously. Using high quality info graphics, images and even HTML5 videos all add value to the website but they need to work together.

For instance, make sure all the colours work so use a contrasting shade for text compared to the background colour – cream text on a white background will look nearly invisible as will black text on a dark blue background.

Keep well designed fonts at a reasonable size so that people can read it easily and don’t use too many fonts as the effect will be chaotic. Two is often ideal, one for headers and one for paragraphs, with a third for special pointers.

Connect Insolvency does this perfectly. Dark blue text on a clean, white background ensures that the text is as easy to read as possible.

Mobile-Friendly

The recent fuss about being mobile friendly may have sounded like a temporary panic but there is a firm footing to the idea. More people last year used their smartphone to search for something on the internet than their PC or laptop… and this trend is growing.

Due to recent changes in Google’s search algorithm, if a website isn’t mobile-friendly, it won’t show up on search results for phone. This could potentially lose you traffic and custom.

Strong Content

There is a temptation to add lots of information onto every page but the best websites limit how much information they supply on each page, especially key landing pages. Provide small and relevant segments of information per page, keeping to around 200-300 words.

Make sure that the content is engaging too – you won’t gain points for your Search Engine Optimisation or SEO if the content is poorly written, stuffed with keywords and doesn’t really say anything. This includes elements such as meta-tags, alt tags and meta-descriptions, all of which act as indicators to search engines what the site is about.

Social Media

Don’t forget the importance of connecting your website to social media and having a presence on the main social channels. Linking your website to a Facebook page and/or a Twitter account and vice versa is an important way to drive traffic to your site and find new customers. Social media interaction also adds to your ranking on Google and other search engines so is a win-win proposition.

Need help redesigning your website? Get in touch now to see how we can help you and your business!

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