Color schemes on websites

Today there are millions of sites on the web. Once someone has found your site, you have only seconds to make them stay. Often great content is not enough; you must have a stunning web site. Change your website's design with your css file. You want innovative design and of course easy to follow navigation, but you also need to use colors well. You want to have colors that make your sites different than others, that make them stand out in a crowd, and that assist the site in carrying out its ultimate goal, rather than hindering it. I look at the colors on many otherwise fine sites every day, and think, "What was the designer thinking?" Many sites look like the designer got to the end of the process, and ran out of time or budget before changing the colors to something that made sense.

If you try out every color under the sun on every web site you build, you will never get any of them done, and you will end up ignoring other factors.

Color rule number one:

If you have access to the images that will be used in the header, then use those colors to help determine your color palette. You normally can't change the colors in a photograph to work with the colors you select for the rest of your site, but you can do things the other way around. You can match the colors from any photograph or drawing with the use of free tools like Color Cop.

Color rule number two:

Don't be locked in to thinking all hyperlinks must be blue. The main consideration with a hyperlink should be that it is readily apparent to viewers that it is a hyperlink (exception: some clients want external links to authority sites, that they don't really want their viewers to click on). Remember that you have four types of links: normal, hover (when the mouse is over the link) , active (when clicked on), and visited. This gives you the opportunity to use four different colors. With some color schemes this isn't practical, but you always want to at least use two widely contrasting colors.

Color rule number three:

There should be some type of logic to how you pick your colors. Look at the themes available in various popular design software, there is a logic to how all of the colors are chosen.

Color rule number four:

Don't depend too much on rules used in the fashion industry or elsewhere. When I was in college, one of my classmates told me that I couldn't wear blue pants with a green shirt. Today I see people wearing that color combination all the time. It looks absolutely fine.

Color rule number five:

Understand who the end user is, and learn the psychological aspects of colors. Just as you don't want a site with fonts that are hard to read if your target market is senior citizens, you don't want to make a pink and gray site aimed at men, or a red and black site aimed at women.

Color rule number six:

Make sure that you have enough contrast between the background and the text to insure that your text is easily readable. (Reduce the size of your text temporarily to test this.)

Put in some time and effort to selecting the right colors. It will pay off big dividends in terms of a better looking site.