"A color normally known to incite passion in real life might hurt the eyes of a web visitor."

If you are blessed with the gift of sight then you are affected by color. The light of the sun passes through the spectrum of our atmosphere and the sky turns blue, daisies become yellow and blood runs red. The pigments in the things around us pick up the light and reflect their true colors.

Color impacts almost everything including our mood and the moods of our surfers. The correlation between color and marketing is as well known as the yellow and red of the home of the golden arches. The colors you display on your site, logo or advertising banner can entice your customers to buy or drive them away. Certain hues are better for particular types of sites and pages. Fonts are easier to read depending on their shade and the shade of the background on which they are exhibited.

A color normally known to incite passion in real life might hurt the eyes of a web visitor. The tints and tones you like personally may not be right for your potential audience. From simple visibility to customer predictability, it’s wise to consider the power and possibilities of color.

The first thing to consider is if the colors arrayed on your adult site interfere with a surfer’s ability to navigate your page.

The US Department of Commerce gives a great tip on how to take an objective look at the readability of your web page. Set your monitor to black and white and look at your HTML page/layout from your browser. Can you read your text now? Do your eyes focus on the spots your want your visitors to focus on? Will you be able to market effectively to the one in twelve Internet surfers who are colorblind?

The next step to take is to return your monitor to color and look at your page as if you’ve never seen it before. Can you find your way around it? Is the text readable?

Blue fonts on a black background are pretty hard to read. Red fonts on a white background hurt the eyes if displayed in long strings. Black text on a white background may be good for print but can get a little unnerving with the added glare of a monitor.

The default font color for a text hyperlink is a royal blue color while the default color for the link -once it’s been visited- is red. Those default font colors might look crappy with your monochromatic brown site design. You’ll have to assign link colors that blend with your palette yet appear clickable to the surfer.

What about your graphic banners? Do they stand out on your page? Do the shades on your site overwhelm your advertising? Do the ads blend so well they disappear? Look at your site as if you were a stranger. Do the colors and logos and ads make you want to buy anything? Does that black background really imply cute hot coeds?

There are all kinds of research attributed to the affect of color on buying habits. Many schools of science have conducted studies on color in relation to social behavior. We all know warm colors like red and orange incite passion and action. Cool colors like blue and green connote serenity and trust.

Sadly the statistics aren’t in about the influence of color on Internet shoppers. The stats on adult shoppers might never be tabulated, much less their color preferences. In spite of that, there are some color dos and don’ts that are common in our profession. But we'll save that for part two. In our next installment of this series on color, we'll cover some of those rules.

** Click Here For: Clue in on Color! - Part #2