Most Web designers have well formed color opinions that are dictated mainly by the interests of their client. So as this is the case what should you do when creating a site that considers women as the main body of customers? Well, whatever you decide, don’t go into a pink mania. Just don’t do it! Pink is a strong color, and although it has long been associated with women, it doesn’t mean that all women adore it: some love it but some can’t stand it. The best way to proceed is by doing some research and use colors that represent you best as a logo, brand or company.

A recent study has shown that men and women have different favorite colors. When asked what their favorite color was, men chose blue in a proportion of 57% while women opted for the same color only in a percentage of 35%. This fact raises interesting questions because in general web designers default to blue. In case you are a company that means business and imposes respect, this isn’t a problem. The problem is represented by what this color conveys to different genders.

HTML uses 4 color keywords as follows aqua, black, blue, fuchsia, gray, and green, lime, maroon, navy, olive, purple, red, silver, teal, white and yellow. Sounds fairly simple doesn’t it? Well before you get to excited you should know that there is a second list of keywords first introduced by Netscape, which was the first browser to support color keywords. As if this wasn’t complicated enough spellings comes into action. What I mean by this is that Internet Explorer is very picky when it comes to the way we spell gray or grey. No matter what the name is or who first introduced them, color keywords are a big pain in the “side” (if you don’t know what you are doing, that is).
A second way to define colors is by using numbers. Right off the bat CSS 2 provides us with two ways of specifying colors as numbers: RGB and Hexadecimal RGB.
RGB color numbers
RGB stands for red, green and blue and every other color is obtained by mixing these three colors in different proportions. There are two ways in which you can define a color in RGB: the first way assigns each of these three colors a number between 0 and 255 e.g. rgb (255, 0, 0) whilst the second uses percentage values e.g. rgb (100%, 0%, 0%).
Hexadecimal color numbers
Are the same thing as standard RGB color numbers just converted in base-16. What this means is that every number is formed by three pairs of numbers which take a value from 00 to FF. In this case the color red becomes #ff0000.
CSS color numbers
A more complex system of defining colors by numbers is presented in three categories by CSS 3:
-the transparent keyword
-RGBA color values
-HSL color values
The transparent keyword evolved from CSS 1 to CSS 2 and then finally reached the form we now see in CSS 3. What this mean is that the keyword can be used in any property that has anything to do with color.
RGBA color values simply mean you can set the opacity of the color on a scale that ranges from 0.1 to 1.0. In practice this is achieved as follows :

rgb (red, green, blue, opacity)

Some browsers don’t recognize the last value, the one used to define the opacity. In this case theoretically the color should return to fully opaque. In practice however there is a different story: the color value is completely ignored.
HSL color values
RGB has two major problems that need mentioning. Firstly, in order to display the colors RGB assumes the CRT color model which can lead to problems when trying to print something. This translates into a poor printing on some ocassions because most printers are based on CMYK. Secondly RGB is non-intuitive. This means that while people think of colors in order of hue, saturation and lightness, RGB sees colors in a machine generated way.
In order to adress this problems, HSL color values define hue, lightness and saturation by assigning them numerical codes. For instance red in HSL would be written hsl (0, 100%,50%). Although HSL resolves this problem it too has a drawback in the way that it’s not supported by most browsers.

Web designers have a great arsenal at their disposal in order to create great Web pages, and a big part of this arsenal is formed by colors. What most of them don’t know
though, is how to influence on a subliminal level the people that read their Web pages. The first and most important criteria on you select your colors is your audience. Is it a Western audience, an Eastern one, is it composed of younger people, older people, males or females? All of these things factor in when you make the color choices for your site.

If you create a Web page that is meant for a specific group of individuals, be very careful of the cultural differences involved. The meanings of colors vary from culture to culture. What is OK in one culture may be tabu in another one. The symbolism is also different. For instance in the Eastern cultures the mourning color warned at funerals is white whilst in the Western ones, black is the color of choice. So if you find yourself creating a page for an Asian audience, don’t use a lot of whites, because it could be disturbing.

The same principle apllies to age differences. Children and teenagers are suckers for bright intense colors so if your page is in shades of grey and mellow color you will score points with the parents but loose your intended audience in the blink of an eye.

As long as money dictate the way things happen around the world there will also be class differences. Studies have shown that working people tend to prefer colors that are tangible, that can be referred to by simple common names such as blue, red green, yellow and so on. Wealthier people, and people with a higher level of education tend to prefer colors which are more exotic like taupe, azure, mauve, lila etc. Think about this for a minute before making any misplaced comment about what I’ve just stated: why do think Walmart has a logo that is bright red?

Last but not least the age old question of men and women. When was the last time you went into a single man’s living room and had the surprise of seeing it decorated with shades or orange and yellow? The cold hard truth is that, from this point of view men and women weren’t created equal. Women are more color sensitive, and as this wasn’t enough, western men are also more likely to be color blind. Men in general prefer cooler colors such as browns, greens, blues, while women are more attracted to warmer colors such as reds and oranges.