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If the colour scheme of your website is finished correctly, then people will admire the website as a good looking site. But a garish website will put visitors off, getting them reaching for the back button before they have even had a chance to study the text on the page.
So, when you are designing your website, how do you know what colours are appropriate to pick? What makes a good colour scheme and what makes a nightmare of a colour scheme?
The background - For a start, look at the background of your website page. Are you trying to say that yours is a bright, vibrant company and picking colours that match this outlook on business? Well that is where you must not go! You might think that bright colours match your company's outlook on business, but very rarely and only if you are a top quality designer will a brightly coloured background work.
Regardless of how fun you think your company needs to be made to look stick instead to the 'normal' background colours. White hardly ever fails and a black background can look stunning, especially if you are trying to show of photographs directly against the black background.
If you do want to add a touch of colour light shades of grey and stronger shades of red, green, blue etc can also work well for most sites.
Panel colours - To highlight areas you will probably want to put a different colour background on the main areas of the website. On the whole, when the background has a colour the panel background is probably going to be white as this makes it far easier to read the text against the white panel background. For a splash of colour and interest on the page you can use in these positions lighter colours. Very pale blues, greens, reds, yellows and so on still make the text over it readable, but the hint of colour can give an interesting appeal to the page.
Text colours - The important element of this choice is to make sure that the text remains readable. Unless you are placing text onto a dark background, then black is almost always readable, but unless there is a lot of interest elsewhere on the page through images, graphics and pictures, it can sometimes seem a little less than exciting.
For this I like to borrow a darker colour out of the logo as a starting point to work from for the main text area if black is not looking exciting enough. But, you do not need to change the entire text to an exciting colour, just the headers, links and so on will give enough lift to the page to make it interesting. Maybe even give the bold text a different colour scheme.
It must match! - Whatever you do the colour palette of the page must match. For ideas on a full colour palette you can pick just one colour that you want to include in the website, say from your logo, and then type in the colour name to Google and make some searches for colour palettes that include that colour. Even just changing the colour from a light blue to a lighter blue can sometimes affect the entire colour palette that will work well together, there are never hard and fast rules that certain colours always work.
About this Author
Keith Lunt owns Janric Website Design. If you want to know more about internet marketing, call across to the internet marketing blog and pick up a copy of our free internet marketing ebook!
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