The average user expects professional websites to be clean in appearance, rich with information, and intuitive in terms of navigation. In Mequoda terms, the aesthetics of a site should support its purpose and match the user mental model—or be appropriate for the people that the website serves.
- Site design doesn’t need to be pretty and perhaps not even serious, but it should certainly not be boring.
- A corporate-style B2B site might want to stick to the colors black and blue and gray, with some stock art and an occasional splash of bright color.
- A consumer-oriented site will need to be much more colorful, with lots of visual flair, or perhaps appear comfortable and homey.
- Layout, typefaces, and colors give a site its personality and image.
- Remember, however, that the color red sends a contradictory subliminal message, meaning “stop” or “danger,” a message that is not something a site usually wants to project. Yellow or orange are more inviting and engaging colors for buttons and highlights.
Users respond best when the site appears as a simple, reliable, secure, trustworthy, perhaps comforting, online source of information.
[text_ad]
