Red Makes You (and Your Website) Sexier

AdWords For Dummies http://askhowie.com author Howie Jacobson discusses recent scientific findings that wearing red makes people appear sexier. He presents 3 examples (2 good, 1 bad) of web pages using color to draw eye gravity to a desired outcome.

Video Transcription

Hey, it's Howie Jacobson from askHowie.com, and today I want to talk about color and of course sex. See, I was reading in CNN recently; this appeared yesterday, Tuesday, October 28, this article, Wearing red may boost your sex appeal. A bunch of researchers showed photographs of women wearing different color clothes, and men were asked to rate how sexy they were on a variety of questions. They found that women wearing red were sexier than women wearing any other color. So that naturally led me to thoughts of website design. So you will notice here on my site, there is two little spots of bright red; one of them right here, above the I, and that is suppose to draw your attention from the face. The first thing people will look at on a website is a face, a human figure. In this case, it's looking straight at you, to be engaging. It might be more effective to be glancing a little bit this way to draw the eye to the red. Why do I want to draw them to the red, because that naturally connects with the next bit of red here, the Subscribe button, which is really what I want people to do when they arrive at my homepage. So Let's take a look at a couple of examples of this. I did some work in Germany and discovered a couple of sites around health insurance. Let me show you for example one of them, that does the color thing very well. You can see here the faces, and the faces lead you to something else, you see there is some interesting stuff going on here; I told you this was about sex. So you can see some hands entwined, maybe his hands on her leg. This picture naturally, after the faces, gravitates towards the legs, which then gravitates here towards this big red button with the price on it. That is the same color again as the Absenden button, the Submit button for the form, which is the goal of this website. Let's compare this health insurance site from Germany to a different one that doesn't have a key element that draws your eye. Here the main thing that draws you eye is the woman's belly button, but instead of leading you to somewhere on the page, it leads you up; she is looking up, and her hand is reaching up. It's leading you out psychologically back to the back button, and there is nothing else on this site that draws you in, that makes you want to continue it. So just to check what my site would look like, I went to google.cn and I typed in my URL, askHowie.com, and then I translated it into Chinese. So again, you can see, without understanding virtually a word of what's written here, the main things are, here is my face, there is a little face here that I see more clearly, pointing that way, and the link again between the big red button. So the eye gravity goes from the top, instantly down to the button, and that is what we want to work on when we are doing web pages. We want to make sure our web pages are sexy and attractive, and they are moving the eye exactly where it needs to be. So from askHowie.com, this is Howie Jacobson, wishing you a great week, and don't forget, wear some red.