Time for a Facelift?

If you’re thinking of creating a new real estate website, or if you’re planning a facelift for your existing site, one of the first decisions you have to make is about color.

The colors you choose for your website will have a big impact on the feeling your visitors get when they arrive, so you should put some thought into choosing colors that will produce a good reaction.

Where to Start

If you’re curious about where to start in choosing colors, you might find this information about the meaning of colors interesting.  I’m not sure I agree with everything said in that article.  For example, it says that dark purple is gloomy, but it also represents royalty and richness to me.

The article also says that you shouldn’t use yellow to sell to men.  One of our clients who sells San Antonio real estate wanted a festival look to their site.  The logo we designed highlights the San Antonio riverwalk.  The photos used in the header, taken by a local professional, are very colorful and emphasize the character of San Antonio.  The yellow background on the site isn’t causing any issues with their male clients.

So, I don’t think color meanings are always black and white. . .  excuse the pun.

Useful Internet Color Tools

Once you have an idea of the colors you want to use, you next have to select specific color combinations.  There are a number of tools on the Internet that can help you do that.

Assuming that you don’t want to become an expert in interpreting color modes, one of the easiest sites to use is the ColorCombo site.

On the right side of the home page, you’ll see a list of color tags.  Click on the color of your choice, then scroll down the page to see a variety of color combinations using that color tag as the starting point.  Click on a combination you like, and you’ll see larger color samples – the HEX equivalents for the colors (which is the color identifier used on the Internet) are shown for each combination.

Another site with some great combinations is the Adobe site.  I think this one is a little less user-friendly, but here are the things to look for.  The color combinations are shown at the top of the screen, under the color samples you’ll find a number of controls:

• At the left, there’s a search box.  You can search for a particular color, and combinations that use that color will be displayed.
• Under the search box, you can select Create if you want to try your hand at creating a new color scheme, or view Popular, Highest Rated or Newest color combinations.
• The list of color combinations has very small arrows at the bottom of the list.  You can use those controls to scroll forward or backward through the color schemes, or switch to a 3-column view.
• Click on one of the color schemes, and the colors will appear in the larger version at the top of the screen.
• There is no identifer for the exact colors, but you can give your web designer a screen shot or the name of the color combinations you like, and they can figure out how to reproduce the colors.

Keep in mind that just because a color scheme has five colors in it, you rarely will be able to use all of them at once.  You’ll need to choose which ones you want as the dominant colors, then the others might be used as accent colors.

While there are a lot of other things you need to do to make your website work hard for you, starting with a welcoming design and color scheme is certainly the first step.