Last Updated on June 24, 2021 by

Your winery website design project starts long before you write the first line of code. It requires significant ideation and planning, from using wireframe templates to building a style guide that guides consistency throughout each page of the site. One central step to tackle early: setting your website’s color palette.

That sounds simple. Simply pick a few colors that you like and move forward. But the reality is more complicated. Both in your winery website and your overall marketing strategy, your colors communicate more about your business than you might realize.

Preparing for your winery website design is a complex process. In this guide, we’ll focus on one crucial part: the colors behind it. Additionally, we’ll cover how you can leverage them to better communicate your value propositions. 

The Basics of Color Psychology in Marketing

At its most basic, the concept of color psychology takes a close look at how specific colors influence our choices and behaviors. That’s naturally important in a field like marketing, where persuasion and credibility are crucial. For instance, one study found that a red CTA button outperformed a green button by 21%. That result alone suggests just how important choosing a color intentionally is for your website’s (and business) success.

At its most basic, it’s about color contrast. Any graphic or text in the foreground has to stand out from its background, for two simple reasons:

1. High-contrast color combinations tend to pop, standing out more easily from each other and getting your audience’s attention.
2. High-contrast color combinations also improve accessibility for disabled and vision-impaired. To achieve minimum viable accessibility, you’ll need a contrast of at least 4.5:1.

But it’s about more than simply standing out. The colors you choose, in fact, communicate subtly but strongly what your audience thinks about your winery and its products.

7 Basic Colors and Their Connotations

Successful brands around the world choose their colors based on the subtle connotations audiences associate with them. So why should your winery website design be any different? Below are just some of the most common choices and the associations they bring with them:

• Red: triggers powerful emotions and a sense of urgency. It’s frequently associated with power, passion, fearlessness and excitement, and–importantly for the wine and food industry–tends to increase appetite.
• Orange: triggers feelings of warmth and is considered to be light, bright, and fun. It evokes feelings of confidence and courage but is also the color most consider ‘cheap’ and could stand for immaturity.
• Yellow: represents youthfulness and fun, but becomes a contrast and legibility issue on light backgrounds. Especially male audiences associate it with optimism, happiness, and creativity.
• Green: is relaxing and easy on the eye. It’s a common color for healthy brands due to its strong association with nature. Its association with the color of money also substitutes for growth and prosperity but could evoke feelings of greed and envy.
• Blue: the color of trust and loyalty, it’s extremely common in banking due to its focus on reason and calm effects. But in some audiences do experience a suppression of appetite when encountering this color, making it challenging in the beverage industry.
• Purple: represents wisdom and sophistication, and has traditionally stood as the color of royalty. Some audiences do associate it with excess and extravagance due to the same heritage.
• Black: the color of power and luxury, combining minimalism with elegance when used in moderation. In some audiences, it evokes feelings of coldness, menace, and even mourning, making it a risky choice for wine brands.

Why Your Website’s Color Palette Matters in Your Winery Web Design

The above color associations and connotations make one thing clear: color matters as you plan your winery website design. In fact, they matter in anything related to your marketing effort, from designing a logo to labeling your bottles. 

Depending on the colors you choose, your audience will associate very different things with your brand. A dark website might present elegance, whereas an orange-dominated design may not be the best choice if you want to establish your winery as sophisticated and priced higher than some of the cheap brands in the local wine and spirits store.

As a winery professional, you likely know the subtle difference that the shade of a good vintage can make in the perceptions of everyone who tastes it. As it turns out, the exact same difference exists in the marketing you choose as well. Again and again, the color makes an impact on how your audience perceives your wines and decides to shop with you.

Consistency is another significant factor. Beyond simply choosing the right colors, you have to make sure that you stay consistent in exactly how you present these colors to your audience through all of your venues.

Featuring the same colors in your logo and on your website begins to build brand recognition and equity. But if the color shades differ even slightly from each other, you run the risk of introducing cognitive dissonance that causes your audience to build a distrust of your brand without consciously realizing why that is the case.

Are You Ready to Prepare For Your Winery Website Design Project?

Given the importance of color in wine marketing, it should play a central role in planning your winery website design project. That means not just being intentional about the colors you choose, but also defining exactly what those colors are in order to increase consistency and maximize their impact.

That’s a complex process, especially if you don’t have extensive expertise in either branding or website design. Fortunately, you don’t have to be on your own as you go through that process.

Our expertise in winery website design and development could make us the perfect partner for your project. We have extensive expertise in building websites in your industry, based on both technical knowledge and an intimate understanding of audience needs and preferences. Contact us today to start a conversation and begin the partnership of making your website just the right fit for your current and future customers.