"I Want It GREEN!"
Often times we get distracted by color. Color is important and color is emotional, but color is not the only element in a website design that we should be concerned about. There are many other concerns such as typography, layout, and functionality which too often take a backseat to color, and I think it damages the potential which church and ministry websites have to impact their visitors.
Frustration
I won't deny it. Many of these articles at Mustardseed flow out of a frustration with past website building experiences. Usually, they aren't from any one particular experience but instead are a product of trends that I see in church web design that heartily need to be changed.
People are generally lazy. Often times it takes building frustration to change a situation and offer another way. Hopefully this frustration I have with 'color distraction' will prove to be productive and offer some alternate solutions to this issue.
The Problem
The problem, in my experience, is that when people embark on an adventure of a fresh new webdesign, they fixate on one (possibly the least important) design element: the color palette. Now, I'm not saying the colors in your website are unimportant. Don't get me wrong. A strong color scheme will take your site from good to great in 2.3 seconds. Color is emotional, color is tactile, and inspiring color can alter our moods...but it's not the only player in the game.
The situation goes a little something like this: As your web designer I spend hours doing layout and design of your website comp to present to you (the client). Every thing in that design is there for a reason. A particular font was chosen, a particular layout was developed and functionality was planned for so that your site users can have the most pleasant and useful experience possible. Afterall, if your site doesn't make sense, is hard to read, or is laid out in a confusing method, people will leave.
After all this, I deliver this comp to you for your review, investigation, and approval. You open up the document and dislike in within less than a second. Why? Because it's not Green..and our church color is Green!!! You send it back to say that the comp doesn't work for you and you need another design done.
Do you see the problem here? Because the color wasn't right, the whole concept and design was thrown out. There was little or no attention paid to anything besides whether that primary color was the exact hue of your lobby banners. A wealth of other important factors were dismissed as bad because the color wasn't right. But let me clue you into a little fact of web design: A design's color palette can be changed in a matter of minutes and most color palettes can work with most layouts without any problem. Basically, color isn't a big deal to alter. Layout, information architecture and other important factors of the comp are more difficult to change, but were ignored because of something that is simple to change.
So, why not just change the color scheme and keep the layout? Over the years, I've seen that first impressions make or break a design. If you saw one particular layout which was blue (not your church color) and then it was changed to green (your church color), most often that design will be rejected as well because it had a bad first impression on you.
All of this is a problem that needs to be overcome, especially because established church color schemes are REALLY poorly conceived and out of date. If every church website redesign has to be the exact hue of the color scheme chosen by a volunteer designer in your congregation 25 years ago, we're going to be creating a lot of ugly and out of date-looking websites.
A Possible Solution
At Mustardseed, I've been thinking of ways to break this problem....ways to keep the clients from getting distracted by color. Starting today, we'll be breaking our comp approval up into two parts. Previously, we delivered one 'final' comp which got a thumbs up or thumbs down (or more rarely a 'tweak this and I like it'). However, we will now deliver our comps in two stages:
- Digital Storyboard This stage will have no color whatsoever. (shocking, I know) The purpose here will be to focus on fonts, alignment, placement of elements, functionality, and other non-color related design factors. In my opinion, the most important stuff. This stage will be an enhanced, digital version of traditional website storyboarding. But, really, the purpose will be to keep clients from getting distracted by color scheme.
- Skinning The second phase will be 'skinning' the approved digital storyboard. This will be the color-scheme phase where we implement a scheme to the greyscale design, adding the flash-bang that people like.
Hopefully this new design process will take the focus off the fact that the website isn't green, and help the client see that there's alot more to a design than color.
The Moral?
So, what's the moral of this story? Good web design is more than a color scheme that matches your existing (possibly out of date) marketing materials. A good design includes usability, readability, font choice, line height, sidebar width, use of shadows and gradients, and much much more than has nothing to do with color. So, next time you're deciding whether a design is 'good' or not, put on your color blinders...you'll see things in a whole new way.
