How Websites Can Affect Your Mood
You may not have thought about it, but the design and layout of your website can greatly affect the reader’s psychology. When a visitor arrives to your site, they experience a set of feelings about your website and company. The feelings they product, positive or negative are entirely in your control and should not be overlooked when designing your website. The colours, fonts and spacing of the website all affect the reader’s interpretation of your website and overall state of mind. Choosing the right layout and colour scheme for your website is also vital as you don’t want to give your visitors the wrong impression. We’ve got a few top design psychology tips below for you to take into consideration before making your website.
Design Psychology: Content
Content is an essential factor for driving visitors to your website, when visitors come to your website they are normally seeking answers to questions. The type of content you have on your website can make readers stay and explore your website or instantly leave. The content on your website needs to be easy to read as walls of text and and complicated sentences lose the reader’s attention. The content should be broken into paragraphs with headlines summarising each section to make it easier to skim read and understand the text. This also allows visitors to find the answer they want to specific questions much faster instead of having to read through everything.
Design Psychology: Spacing
The way a website is organised can affect how a visitor feels when they visit. Organising the content on the web page should be a priority in any web design. White space plays an important role of any website layout and helps separate content from headlines as well as gives images their own space. A popular concept nowadays is the minimalist style, which involves using the least amount of visual content to get your point across. This is a great concept as it focuses on keeping the website layout as simple as possible, instead of taking up every space on the page with pictures and writing. This is an important factor to consider when thinking about design psychology.
Design Psychology: Colour
Colours play a big role in design psychology and are one of the easiest ways to change your visitors mood. The colours used on a website are normally based on the company’s logo or colour scheme. These colours if used correctly can help convey positive feelings of trust and knowledge to visitors or any other emotion you want depending on the colours you use. The colour scheme such as Blue and Yellow give the feeling of intelligence and warmth to the user and will keep visitors on your site for longer. Whereas Black and White can give the feeling of coldness, death and unfriendliness which could lead to a higher bounce rate on your website.
Design Psychology: Fonts
Typography can convey a lot of emotion and feelings for visitors to your website and are a key aspect of design psychology. There are literally thousands of fonts out there and thanks to new versions of web browsers and CSS3 no longer are we stuck with Arial. The type of font you use on your website can give readers an impression about your website and company within seconds of seeing it. Fonts such as Times New Roman, also known as serif fonts give the impression of professionalism and seriousness. If you look at most online news websites such as the New York Times they use serif fonts to convey the feeling of importance, knowledge and tradition. When you think about choosing a font be sure to think of what message you want to convey to your reader.
Your website can have a big impact on whether your prospective client is going to buy from you or not so it’s important you get it right. If you are looking for other helpful websites and tips to improve your website then make sure to have a read through our other blog posts or contact us using the link below.
