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The sun is not yet up on this Monday morning although it's not far off. I can't see the eastern sky from my home office window so there may be some color there but I just can't see it.

Instead all I can see is the dull grey light of dawn reflected from the white wall of the house next door and in this light even that white wall looks more like a dull gray. The sky ... well it's overcast and we're expecting some rain today so even when the sun does come up it's going to be a day tinged with gray dullness.

Many people find gray days to be rather depressing ... they can become listless and indecisive ... and it can even have an impact on the way they deal with other people and whether they go out to buy stuff or stay shut in at home.

But add the yellow of the sun and the deep blue of a clear sky and the color of most people's day improves out of sight. They're happy, bright and more likely to be optimistic on a bright sunny day than they are on a dull gray day.

Color plays such an important part in every person's life and yet many online marketers pay little ... if any ... attention to the colors that they use on their websites. It's been known for many many years that using the right colors on and in buildings, on signs and in public transport can make a person feel more relaxed ... more hungry ... more cautious ... more willing to buy ... but many of us have never stopped to think about color.

Many of us have looked at what's gone before ... what other people have done ... and simply replicated what they have seen other people do. Here in adult we stick with black as the background color because ... well because we think that must be the right color for an adult site because everyone else uses black. But what if it isn't?

What if some brighter ... more friendly ... more suggestive color might make our site visitors more willing to buy what we're selling? What if black is actually working against you?

Perhaps because black has been the color of choice for adult webmasters for so long there is a chance it could be working against us. Perhaps black and adult are linked in the minds of many people subconsciously they're on guard against being ripped off as soon as they see a porn site with a black background.

So have you thought of using other colors in the design of your websites? Have you thought of making the design elements of your websites much brighter ... more cheerful ... more clickable?

Steve popped that question on the weekend. We were discussing a new mainstream site I was designing for a particularly fussy and sometimes conservative client ... me ... and he asked me if I had considered using brighter and more eye-catching colors on the site.

I must admit that I hadn't thought of using the sort of colors he was suggesting at all and I certainly wasn't thinking of using them in the way he was suggesting. Steve was actually suggesting that I use bright colors ... and even brighter graphics ... on some of the important links.

I could hardly believe my ears ... here was my conservative search engine focused man suddenly suggesting that I use bright colors for my website and bright graphics for some of my clickable links!

It's certainly given me something to think about because I was going to use the sort of colors you would normally associate with a business ... trust-inducing colors like pastel shades of blue. While blue may induce trust it's also a little dull ... certainly not exciting ... and maybe on some monitors those nice sweet pastel shades may be hard to see.

And just to support his ideas about website colors Steve sent me off to an interview with a leading mainstream marketer ... a guy who has made a lot of money out of turning dull, under-performing websites into real money makers ... where he discusses colors.

His advice was to think about using bright colors and graphics ... on important links like the call to action button. Blue links in other places can be important because there is still an expectation among Internet users that links will be blue but you want your call to action to stand out so use bright colors ... bright like orange.

Yes ... this guy suggests that your call to action should be a button and he suggests that orange is a good to color to use. Now how will bright colors like that look on the black background that so many adult marketers still use today?

Maybe it's time that you and I experimented with some bright colors ... colors that change a person's day and colors that will encourage them to feel good about buying what we're selling.