This is probably the most important consideration when designing a website. It sounds obvious – that your website would look like all your other marketing materials. But, I run into more and more entrepreneurs who want to break this rule for various reasons.
The reasons tend to be:
- That the web allows you to use as many colors as you want, without paying extra. Many forms of printing still charge per color of ink used, and using more than 2 or 3 colors can get very expensive for small businesses. The web, however, does allow you to use all the colors that you want, for free!
Many entrepreneurs get very excited about this, and use every color they can think of throughout the site. And, sometimes, they choose not to use the 2 or 3 colors that they’ve used in their print materials because they’re sick of them. This results in a website that doesn’t look anything like their other designed materials, and creates a “disconnect” for clients who come to your site from a reference of another piece. For example, if someone’s looking at your business card, designed in black and red, and then they go to your website, where there’s some black and red, but also bright blue, gold, green and a touch of purple, it can make the website look like it belongs to a different company! It makes your visitor wonder if they’re in the right place, and that can make you lose their trust.
A better way to use color online is to take advantage of the wider palette of colors available, but to use them as secondary colors. If your printed materials are mostly blue and gold, that doesn’t mean that you have to use only blue and gold in your website – but they should be the main colors used. Adding in highlights of khaki or green can look very nice and add more visual interest to your website, but if you choose green to be your main color for your website, it will be confusing.
Also, make sure that the extra colors you do choose fit in with your brand and communicate the messages that you want to send out about your business – in other words, don’t choose more colors just because you can. Make sure that there’s a solid design reason and that the psychology behind the colors that you’re adding to your palette makes sense.
Another way to add more color online is by using full-color photography. Stock photography is quite inexpensive and accessible to even the smallest businesses now, and can add a lot of pep and pizzazz to your tired color palette.
But, I can almost guarantee you that unless you’ve been in business a very long time, or you’ve been harassing your clients with constant marketing mailings, you’re the only one who’s bored of it.
Deciding to take a different design direction on your website is bad for your brand because you need your site to be instantly recognizable as yours. Web surfers have notoriously short attention spans – if they click to your site, and it doesn’t look right, they’ll be off and away to another site in the blink of an eye. They won’t stick around to read your copy, look at your logo, or
I’ve seen this cause many entrepreneurs to create a different logo or masthead for their websites, just because they don’t have the file for their logo close at hand.
If you still know who your designer is, I recommend contacting them and asking for a complete set of digital files of your logo. There’s actually quite a bit of information you should get from your designer to ensure that all of the materials you design in the future are consistent with one another, and I’ve written an article about that:
http://www.elf-design.com/article-Plan-Ahead-Designer.html
It’s a better solution, and better for your brand, to either look up your designer (even if it takes a bit of searching), or to have another designer re-create your logo as a digital vector artwork file, and to use that on your website.
