Colour Themes

[Hart_House]

All good websites have strong colour themes. What are colour themes?

Colour themes are what the website is built around. Most colour themes consist of 3-4 main colours of the website. They can be the same colour but of different shades.

Why is it important to have strong colour themes?

1. It makes the website seem uniform and well planned out
2. Gives it an nice asthetic look, people like looking at good websites
3. Builds on website identity (people associate those colours with your website)
4. Builds trust with consumer as a well established website

All websites have strong colours themes that you can associate with, let me see if you can guess these websites.

When you think of yahoo.com, what colours do you think of?

a. blue
b. green
c. red

When you think of altavista search engine:

1. blue /green
2. yellow/blue
3. black/blue

Using strong colour themes is important for any good website designer who want to attract new visitors and build on website identity.

Hart

[Mortekai]

I would like to add to that if I may....

When it comes to choosing colour themes you should consider that not everyone has good eyesight and so you should avoid making text in soft colours, or colours that blend in to much with the background. I usually recommend to go with either black for light background, or white for dark ones as those always "shine through", but there are other colours that work equally good so trial and error may be required.

I also strongly suggest that you avoid opposites...green backgrounds with red text for example is a big nono, same thing with yellow background and blue text and so on. The opposites just clash and no matter what you do it will not look very good in the end, so avoid opposites.

[ezykiwi]

It works well to have light backgrounds, and bold text colours... such as
aqua backgrounds with white text.

If using graphics, its always good to use boarders around the text.. and shadows.. it makes the files abit bigger.. but much easier on the eye

[leigh88]

I think selecting the color scheme should also consider the client and his/her targeted customers. Professionalism matters in business sites that clarity and less color is desirable. On the other hand more colorful and lively schemes are needed for leisure and entertainment sites.