AP 0834: Does My Website Color Matter?

AskPat 834 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 834 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week. We have a great question today from Alexander, but before we get to his question I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is Design Crowd.

Design Crowd is a website that helps businesses crowd source custom graphics from over 500,000 designers worldwide. It doesn't matter what kind of business you have, you can get a perfect custom design for anything you're looking to get designed every time or your money back. Here's the URL. Check out DesignCrowd.com/askpat to learn more and download a free guide to crowd sourcing and to get $100 off your next design when you enter the promo code “Ask Pat.” All right, now here's today's question from Alexander.

Alexander: Hi Pat, Alex here. First of all, I want to say that I loved your podcast on the SPI AskPat and the 1-DayBB with Chris Ducker. You and your team are just amazing. Okay, here it comes. I'm about to start a recipe site so my question is this, does choice of color matter? While I know that we all react different to different colors like the color red, it can both mean passion or danger and probably other things. I noticed that you yourself use sort of an orange color for the FoodTruckr. Was it a deliberate choice or just something you picked? I'm just wondering what color is the best to use in the food or recipe industry. I just don't want to pick the wrong color. Thank you so much for everything. Have a nice day.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Alexander. Thank you so much for the question. You know, I love little detailed questions like this because it shows that you really care about the work that you're doing. What's really cool about color too and the theme of your website and just the way it looks is it can always be changed. That's the first thing. I know people who have questions like this who have had questions like this for years who never get started because essentially they're using this question as an excuse to not get started because they're scared and they're just worried about being perfect. You don't have to be perfect. What I would recommend is just putting something out there, shipping, as Seth Godin would say and then changing it, making it perfect after that. The truth is you'll never get it perfect. Like when you buy a house, there will always be things that you can change and upgrade and move around. Just get started is the sort of best advice I have for you.

But yes, color can matter. If you were to go to a website that's helping people with depression for example and the website was black and red and just very dark, that wouldn't really help out very well. Yes, in that sense, color does matter. In terms of a food site with FoodTruckr.com, yes, the orange and sort of brown colors were very deliberate. They were kind of going more toward the hipster, rustic kind of look. That's why those colors were chosen. We felt that after the design palette was created that it worked out really well and it also stood out nicely in the world of food and blogs and areas that we were getting into. That's why Smart Passive Income, although they say business colors are great in terms of the nice shades of blue because they're calming and also shows a sense of professionalism, they all have different kinds of qualities to them.

I wanted to create something that was different. Red is sort of a power color. I wanted to present that and that's why you'll see some red on Smart Passive Income. The green having to do with money, yes, we had to balance the colors red and green because you can definitely get too Christmasy with that. Over time, it's just change. There's been more of one color versus another and it's kind of switched around over time and the black in there too. The main reason why it's those colors versus the blue ones is because it's different. I wanted it to be different when people came to the site. You can have that approach too. What is everybody else doing? Do something completely opposite to stand out if that is indeed the way you want to approach it. Your personality, your style, your voice goes along with it too. Like I said, you can always change things.

In terms of picking colors, I would do actually Google searches for different keywords related to your industry and just see what colors pop out to you and I would experiment. You know, you can actually have somebody create a mock up design for example on Photoshop and literally just have those colors at the background and the colors of the headers and things changed. It would look exactly the same except for the colors. You can even have this designed and figured out before you actually say, “Yes, let's get this thing designed.” Like I said, again after then you can still get it changed. It's very easy to do and see and I would actually just get a design done and have different color palettes that you can choose from. I would go to some of your favorite websites and ask yourself why do you like them and what colors do you like. Don't necessarily just copy those colors, but just consider why you like those colors and try to incorporate something that would match you and your website and the things that you want to do.

Also look at other food blogs to see what they're doing and make a decision whether or not you want something similar but remembering that when you do that you're going to be amongst everybody else. You need to figure out a way to stand out from the crowd too. How are you going to do that? Is it going to be from the color palette and the scheme that you're using or is it going to be something else? Whatever it is, you do need something that's going to be different. I say that very loosely. It doesn't even necessarily have to be something visual. It can just be something, but you need something unique about your brand, your recipe site versus others. Keep that in mind, and Alexander, thank you so much for the question today.

I really appreciate you. I want to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. For those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page. Thank you so much. I appreciate you. Here's a quote to finish off the day from Hannibal. “We will either find a way or make one.” All right, guys. Take care and I'll see you on the next episode of AskPat. Bye for now.