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Psychological Marketing Part 1: Colors

June 9th, 2009

Filed under: Design — David @ 12:10 pm

A very powerful and often underutilized psychological trigger is colors. That’s right good old fashioned, basic colors. Each color makes us feel a certain way and gives us different impressions on different things.

For this post though we will look at web/internet colors and the way these colors make people feel.

Of course in keeping things simple I’m not going to get into the complete psychology of colors but will give you a brief description of feelings that are associated with certain colors.

White: cleanliness, innocence, creativity, purity, neutrality, simplicity, spirituality, life (Western Cultures), marriage (Western Cultures), death (Eastern Cultures).

For more information on color symbolism and the psychology of colors have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_symbolism

Black: power, seriousness, authority, elegance, darkness, stability, strength, sophistication, secrecy, intelligence, death (Western Cultures), evil, mystery, anger, sadness.

Gray: conservative, practical, neutrality, security, maturity, indifference, timeless, reliability, gloominess, old, reserved, sadness, death, depression.

Red: energy, passion, excitement, danger, movement, warning, life, impulse, love, action, giving, adventure

Orange: fun, comfort, happy, creativity, energetic, celebration, warmth, youth, ambition, affordability

Yellow: laughter, curiousity, happiness, playfulness, good times, cheerfulness, optimism, amusement, cowardice, fire

Green: calming, money, wealth, nature, conservative, health, envy, healing, good luck, life, fertility, harmony, generosity, peace, harmony, nurturing, support

Blue: calming, trustworthiness, restful, success, wisdom, seriousness, dependable, calmness, loyalty, power, productive, professional

Purple: royalty, wealth, justice, prosperity, ambiguity, uncertainty, sophistication, luxury, mystery, fantasy, wisdom, dreams, respect, pompous

Pink: love, tenderness, softness, romance, sweetness, calm, innocence, soothing, youthfulness

Brown: readability, primitive, stability, earth, friendship, natural, simplicity, organic, mourning (India)

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What’s a Favicon and Why Should I Have One?

February 8th, 2009

Filed under: Design, Tutorials — David @ 9:17 pm

A favicon is a small 16 by 16 pixel image that shows up in the address bar for a website. For this site you’ll notice the favicon is a scientist with glasses. A favicon is good for your website because it can help people remember your site and if they have your site bookmarked they can find your link quicker since they now associate your site with the little icon.

Because of the small size of a favicon you can’t really use complex images or long logos. A simple image is fine. You might even have to cut your logo down or redo it to be favicon friendly.

Favicon’s aren’t your standard image. They are .ico files. A quick google search should find you an online favicon generator to make one easily from any image. You don’t have to bother paying for a program or for a site access there are tons of free online favicon generators.

A favicon is normally installed at the root of your website (meaning right in the public_html section, not in a separate folder). Then you add the following code to the <head> section of your templates:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico"/>

A favicon will help your site stand out from the crowd and gives your site a subtle memorable aspect.

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Can I Use this Image?

January 28th, 2009

Filed under: Design — David @ 7:45 am

When creating a site a lot of times you need images or pictures that you didn’t personally take. The hard way is to go out and actually take those pictures. The easy way is finding someone or someplace that has the image you want and using it.

Before you go out to google images and start snatching pictures, remember images are protected under copyright law. You don’t want to get cease and desist notices or in a worse case scenario sued for using someone elses pictures. There are ways to avoid any problems.

What you are looking for is usually stock photos. The best kind of stock photos is usually royalty free stock photos. Do a search for royalty free stock photos and if you find something you like you will either have to pay for it or you might get lucky and find a free stock photo site. Remember each site has different licensing rules and each site dictates how you can use their images so read their terms and/or licensing agreements.

Another way is just visiting a website that has an image you want and asking the site owner if you can use their image. Some will say, “yes,” some will say, “no,” and some will want you to pay. The main thing is your conscience is clean and you won’t have any legal issues in the future.

A couple of good resources for stock photos are:

Stock XChng A large assortment of completely free stock photos.

IStockPhoto Stock photos for cheap. Small sizes are only $1.

There are tons of other good resources out there, but these are two of the biggest and most affordable services out there.

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Clean Sites vs. Messy Sites

January 25th, 2009

Filed under: Design — David @ 7:03 am

A lot of people think that to have a good site it has to have 400,000,000 links and options all over the place. The only thing this does is confuse the user. I prefer to have a nice clean design, with very easy navigation. If you do have 1,000 navigation buttons you might want to add a drop down menu or something similar with more options. A lot of websites trying to be the best just confuse the user and lose visitors. It’s always good to start a site as clean and as uncluttered as possible. You don’t want your site to look like a parked page.

This is where the K.I.S.S. (Keep it Simple Stupid) concept should be used. Too many webmasters and designers try to over complicate things. If you keep it simple even the most novice internet users should be able to use your sites with no problems.

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Ads to Blend or Not to Blend…

January 17th, 2009

Filed under: Design, Monetizing Your Site — David @ 7:18 am

Depends. For Adsense, YPN or similar ads (especially text ads) the best thing in all of my experiments is to blend it in with your content. I’ve had extremely high click through ratios for years doing this. There are some people that will disagree and say that making the ads completely different colors and sticking out will get you more clicks, but I don’t believe that and so far my experiments haven’t shown that.

Also when I say blend I mean exactly matching all colors, not make it look similar in colors. It has to look like part of your content or part of your sidebar links. It might sound hard to use the exact colors but it’s actually very simple.

Making Your Ads Blend How-To. The way I do it is I open up my website or template and use Visual Color Picker. It’s an awesome freeware program that will tell you exactly what colors are on your page. Of course you can use Photoshop or a similar program but Photoshop doesn’t let you find your colors from websites that are already online. Anyway I open up my website and use the program, find the colors I need to blend, then make notes of each color (colors are in the #000000 format). Then I go to my ad company let’s say Adsense for example and input the colors. Ta…da…it’s that simple. In under 5 minutes I have all the colors I need for my ads.

For banner ads or ads that are images I don’t worry about blending in the colors, I just make sure the ads are relevant to my site.

If you design websites, manipulate images, or anything like that Visual Color Picker is a great tool for your arsenal. I find myself using it almost every day for different jobs. Of course you can’t beat the price (FREE!!!).

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