Color theory helps us understand how people perceive colors and the message colors can convey. But why does this matter for your law firm’s website? Color has the capability to impact how your potential clients both think and behave, and it’s important to take a look at what your website’s colors are communicating to your visitors.
Every time you interact with a potential client through your digital presence, there is an opportunity for you to impact their perception of your firm. Through thoughtful design and color choice, your website can better connect with potential clients to convert them into paying clients. Read on to learn the benefits of color in consumer psychology, color theory for common colors, and tips for making cohesive design choices with color.
Color theory and consumer psychology
It’s important to approach color choices thoughtfully in the design process. Color choice is just one of the ways your website can effectively target and convert your ideal client, but it’s also one of the main design elements of your website. Color can emphasize multiple aspects of your website’s design such as its ability to evoke emotion, maintain logical order, and attract attention to your calls to action.
Evoking emotion with color
Color can greatly influence the first impression of your website due to its ability to enhance certain emotions. Feelings such as excitement, anxiety, and relaxation are all common emotions that can be affected by color choice. When making design decisions for your website, it’s important to consider the response your potential clients may have to your color choices and if this makes sense for your messaging and practice area(s).
Color and logic order
The color choices for your firm’s website can work to deliver a harmonious, boring, or chaotic experience to your visitors. When the visual experience is too bland, the visitor may struggle to engage with your content. At the other extreme, your website’s visual experience can be too stimulating and feel chaotic and off-putting to a web visitor. Color harmony is a logical structure that delivers a sense of order while remaining visually interesting.
Color choice and calls to action
Incorporating color contrasts in your website design is an effective way to draw the eye to a specific element on your web pages, such as a call to action. Choosing a high-contrast color alongside your primary color highlights that feature and can influence a web visitor to engage.
Color theory for common colors
People can respond differently to color based on their personal experience, but there are commonalities that can help you make better choices about website colors.
Blue
Blue tends to be versatile in website design and is often associated with feelings of trust, wisdom, success, and confidence. Blue tends to be a frequent choice amongst attorneys. Lighter shades of blue elicit a soft and calming energy while darker blues can represent integrity and seriousness.
Red
Red is a color of passion and energy making it another common choice for legal websites. Red is useful for attracting the attention of web visitors right away and evoking feelings of power and urgency. Brighter shades of red convey boldness while darker shades elicit endurance and leadership.
Green
Green gives a sense of nature, health, and creativity to website design. It can also evoke feelings of stability and abundance, and is the third most common color choice for law firm web design. Light green can symbolize youthfulness while dark green can represent determination.
Yellow and Orange
Yellow and orange can evoke feelings of enthusiasm and creativity. They can also be effective for attracting the attention of your website visitors. However, yellow and orange can be difficult to read on screen without the proper hue or contrasting accent colors.
Making cohesive design choices with color
Beyond the psychology of your firm’s color choices, it’s important to consider how these colors will work together online. A harmonious visual experience will encourage web visitors to engage with your website content and get in touch with your firm. These design choices will also help you make better, more informed decisions in your overall digital presence.
Color and your client persona
Understanding your ideal client persona will help you choose the primary color for your website design. Consider the personality of your ideal client and the emotions you intend to elicit with your website’s design. For example, an estate planning practice may choose a darker hue of red for their primary color to give a sense of tradition, power, and professionalism. This helps them project an image of authority that will attract potential clients with a greater intent to hire.
Color and readability
An important design factor is the readability of the text on your website. Using high contrast colors will make it easier for potential clients to read your website content. Most firms tend to use a dark text against a white or light background. In addition, darker hues tend to attract attention first and are best for page headings.
Accent colors
Accent colors can work to complement your website’s dominant color choice and solidify your firm’s brand personality. A good rule of thumb is to choose a primary color with two complementary colors to build a complete color palette. The primary color will be the main color on a majority of your web pages while the complementary colors will be used for calls to action, navigation menus, headers, hover effects, and other secondary design elements.
Colors in images
To create a cohesive look for your firm’s website, consider the colors in the images used on your website. Images tend to be a focal point on any web page, and if they have colors that are harmonious to your website design this can enhance the visual appeal. While there are likely several colors in any given image, focus on the primary color of the image to determine its fit for your website.
Staying consistent in design
Be consistent with your color choices throughout your website to make it more user friendly and attractive. Stick to a select few colors for your palette and use these in the same ways across all web pages. For example, if you choose a particular contrast color for your call to action, apply this choice everywhere that call to action appears on your website. This also applies to colors used for clickable links, headers, and other repeating elements to visually guide readers through your written content.
Color plays a significant role in how we interact with brands and businesses and it’s essential to consider how color can help your firm target your ideal client. Whether you are looking to build a new website or you’re considering making some changes to an existing website, take some time to carefully choose a color palette that best speaks to your potential clients.
