While the meaning of colours changes across cultures, green is fairly universal. It usually implies growth, nature and vibrant youth. Studies have shown it has a calming and relaxing effect. In marketing, it has come to represent the “Green” movement of sustainability in products and industry.
Some general categories of web sites that could benefit from using green include:
Spas
Colours commonly used: Ivory, brown, lavender, gold, light blue
Considering the power of green to relax, it is very curious that spas and resorts are not using it. After going through dozens of web sites, I saw only one that had a tiny hint of green in one of the link areas, and it was more of a teal.
Below is a very classic spa site– various types of ivory and brown with a splash of purple. Nearly all of them use this colour scheme, with the exception of a few that chose blue and gold.
Nurseries/Landscaping
Colours commonly used: Green, dark blue, yellow
When selling plants, green would be an obvious colour to use in the web site. Unfortunately, it is not often used in a pleasing manner. Take a look at the site below to see green overused:
Notice all the different greens haphazardly tossed together create an atmosphere extremely difficult to look at? This is partly due to the layout, but also serves to demonstrate how large areas of bold green can be overwhelming. If any colour were chosen to recreate this design it would be a problem, so the issue does not lie with green itself. This demonstrates that a colour misused can negate its symbolism. Green most definitely does not relax and soothe the eye on the Garden Valley Ranch site.
There are unfortunately hundreds of examples showing how green can be misused in various nursery sites online. It is rare to see a well designed site for a nursery– I went through nearly 200 nursery web sites and found they were all extremely amateur.
Green Building
Colours commonly used: Green, teal, black, dark grey
While not visually impressive, it does have many excellent features to the design. The navigation is large enough to easily find and click, there is plenty of white space and it shows an elegant use of green as an accent colour. It could use better organization and presentation of the content of the site, but overall the site is much better than average. It also shows how even a light touch of green can be effective.
This shows a medium use of green– it is more than an accent colour, but still not taking over visually. It also maintains a readable font size throughout the web site. There are places the design could be improved, but this is an excellent example of using the colour green without it becoming overwhelming.
Green is not being well used even in sites that are an obvious choice for it– I am not entirely sure why. There are applications for it even in unrelated sites that are more abstract in nature– such as insurance.
To finish off, here are some good examples of green being used online. Interestingly, the primary colour used in web design company web sites is green:
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