Color Bars uploaded to Flickr by jigpu

The colors you choose for your website affect how much your visitors like your website. You probably could have guessed that, though. It turns out that cooler primary colors make websites appear more orderly to users, which in turn can lead to users thinking that your site is more aesthetically pleasing and more usable, which in turn can make your site look more credible and trustworthy.

Researchers at Michigan State University did a study of how color choices affect user impressions of websites and their findings came out in the recent issue of the Journal of Usability Studies in a paper titled “An Empirical Investigation of Color Temperature and Gender Effects on Web Aesthetics.”

According to the study, using a cool primary color such as blue for the top part of the page and/or as a global element will make websites look better organized and aesthetically pleasing to users; using a cool color as a secondary color on the page boosts the website’s appeal over a warm color as a secondary color.

Attractiveness matters. Users often think that sites are easier to use when they are more attractive. Of course, the right color scheme to use also depends on context–what type of character you want, your users’ expectations, how the rest of your marketing materials portray you or your products.

This paper makes for a good read. It is good to read some research into how color affects design, and in its literature review, it points out a number of other papers that may be interesting.