5 Easy color Lessons for Your Blog.

And why should you care? Because color helps to identify who you are, your business, your presence online and off. it’s worth learning how color can influence – or not, your visual presence on the internet.

Webster’s dictionary defines the word “Brand” as:

a public image, reputation, or identity conceived of as something to be marketed or promoted

And I’ll add one more – recognized.

I firmly believe there’s an audience for every passion online – even yours. But how will potential visitors find you? Were you ever familiar with the “Yellow Book” of businesses? It’s now an antique. The Internet is the yellow book and if your presence is not known, it will be hard to build an audience. Which I’ll discuss in another post.

However if the colors of your “Brand” / logo / ADs are recognizable of your presence online, it will  help people to find you. So visual presentation, colors and layout are important to attract visitors to your blog or flee .

For now let’s focus on color.

Choice of color used on a blog is like choosing what you’re going to wear for the day where people at work, or shopping at the mall will see you. They know nothing about you.

They just see what you look like, scan what you’re wearing, how you look, your mannerisms and this creates in a split second an impression of you. Right or wrong, depends on who’s looking at you – which happens with your blog.

Now let’s start with HubSpot. This is a popular marketing website and they’ve used the color orange for years. They offer a lot of useful, free content on their blog. But why orange? It’s a nice positive color, right? Notice their logo. They’ve incorporated the orange in the logo throughout their website unifying their color theme.

If we look to analyzing what colors mean, here’s a description of what orange means:

 

Orange combines the energy of red and the happiness of yellow. It is associated with joy, sunshine, and the tropics. Orange represents enthusiasm, fascination, happiness, creativity, determination, attraction, success, encouragement, and stimulation… Read more here on “Color Wheel Pro”

Hubspot uses orange throughout their website and shows consistency in the “feel” of their website’s positive, and welcoming visual presentation.

But, not every page is boldly orange as you see above. They use orange as an accent on other pages and threw in another color to also use as an accent. Orange is the primary color.

Notice the teal color. So where did this color come from? Did the website designer guess, make it up? I rather think they did some research on complimentary colors to support the positive, visual feel of their website.

Maybe HubSpot’s website designer used this excellent tool such as the “Color Calculator” . This is a really useful tool to use if you’re not sure about the relationships of color and how to use them. The color calculator takes the guess work out of figuring it out on your own.

I suppose back in the day it didn’t matter so much about color and visual presentation. But today it does with Google and other search engines responding to what people are looking for – quality content on quality websites.

Our blogs are not about what WE like. Now it’s about our visitors and how we can attract them to us and provide valuable content for them to experience.  “First Impressions”  are real and the attention span online is a nano second. There’s lots of competition on the internet. So how can you set yourself apart from all the others?
Consider the visual presentation of your website.

Here are the 5 lessons from this post to consider:

1. Who are you and how would you express it through color. Usually when we start a blog we choose the colors WE like. But blogging now is really about projecting what your site offers through the colors you use. What colors fit appropriately with your passion?
2. Consistency throughout your blog. Using different colors on different pages and posts creates confusion. Use the same color scheme.
3. Keep it simple. Less is more and more influential to the scanning eye.
4. Are the colors on your website, your logo, using colors that are recognizable – people know it’s you?
5. Can potential visitors through social media, can they identify with your message/logo / ADs using the colors you’ve chosen to represent you and consistent within your website?

There’s a lot to consider when creating a blog. How you present it visually, even the very theme you choose – all plays a part in a blogs success.

I say enjoy the learning journey, It’s worth it.