Capture the Boomer Market with Color and Clarity

Capture the Boomer Market with Color and Clarity on Your Website: Whether it’s taste, smell, touch, sight or hearing, the aging senses of baby boomers require more everything in order to register sensations. With 76-million boomers, this may be something to consider as you design your real estate website in Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Arizona or even Mexico!

The baby boomers spend a whopping 20-50% of the money. And they often want a change of pace; many are ready to sell, relocate or find a second home. Being computer savvy, they do look for information on the Internet and will take pleasure in the design of your real estate website-if you consider the aging dilemma ahead of time.

Aging generally means a loss of sensitivity to blue light. A successful interior designer recently discovered that her visual color sensitivity is waning; she erroneously called a blue-and-yellow sample, “charcoal and cream.” And when other younger people disagreed, the moment of aging reality hit. Even a touch of color blindness will mute the palette. That’s why color choice in website design for realtors and others becomes very important.

People will be able to see your information more clearly if your realtor website design uses minimal amounts of reds and liberal amounts of intense blues and greens, as well as contrasting hues. Rich, clear colors and the use of strong contrast are easiest for the eye to capture.

The mechanisms governing visual loss with aging are similar to what happens with 4-5% of people that are red-green colorblind. For the severely red-green colorblind, there are only the two hues that a color-normal person sees as yellow and blue. Intermediate colors appear as gray. So, clear graphics are very important. The trick is to keep brightness differences large and to avoid color combinations that do not contrast well. (You can check for contrast by taking a black-and-white photo or using gray-scale.)

As a point of discussion, there are two types of color mixing:

1. mixing colored light and
2. mixing color pigments. Projecting two different-colored beams of light onto a screen, the resultant color occurs according to the principle of additive color mixing.

On the contrary, if you mix two different colored paints, the resultant color occurs according to the principle of subtractive color mixing. Colored light can be mixed to get white; colored pigment mixes can produce black.

That being said, electronic media and using the computer screen for visual marketing is all about mixing colors of light. It may help to know that more than 200 years ago, Newton showed that white light was composed of multiple wavelengths. Simple lenses will refract light deferentially as a function of wavelength. Short (blue appearing) wavelengths are refracted more than long (red appearing) wavelengths. Purple and blue light waves move much faster than light waves of other colors, making it more difficult for the slower eye to keep up with them. But if you make these colors strong, then the tired eye will at least pick up a blue or purple hue instead of simply seeing gray.

The eye limits our perceptions, possibly to simplify an awesome cosmos. For example, a rainbow is not just an arch of light but, really, the whole sky is loaded with raindrops and the eye can only see that narrow band of color and we call that a rainbow! So, too, you can limit yourself to a clear design with a contrasting use of color and see how your market responds.