Building a new website or rebuilding an existing one choosing the right colors for your website design could be a challenge. Let’s look at some of the best tools for selecting website colors.
For as long as businesses have been advertising themselves in an attempt to further ply their trade, advertisement design has been a vibrant, fascinating division of the advertising world. If you think about the old-fashioned ads you might have seen growing up, peering at old magazines at your grandparents’ home, you’ll remember that each decade had its own distinctive style. With the rise of television through the 1950s and 1960s, television advertising became the norm, using a combination of music, visual design, and even voice acting to advertise a business. This is how it stayed until the Internet swooped in and changed everything.
[tweet_dis inject=”@donnaamos”]Your website needs to be attractive, eye-catching, and easy to navigate. There’s a lot to consider when you’re designing a new website, and selecting a good color scheme is an essential element for good design. You want to use colors that represent your brand and adequately convey the attitude you want to project to the world. This list offers a few suggestions to point you in the right direction for the best website colors and color schemes.
Rule 1: Genius in Simplicity
The best website color schemes are, more often than not, the simplest. Although your business might trade in antique portraits or Renaissance art, you don’t need to use the color techniques of Henri Matisse for your website. While complexity and subtlety of coloration are admirable traits in classical artworks, for website colors your best bet is to opt for a simpler, more neutral approach. The reason for this is that your color scheme is not the star of the website. It’s merely a vehicle to attract customers and keep them there.
Of critical importance here is the idea of the consistency of the aesthetic. Simply put, this is the notion that your website has a signature “look” that carries over across all of its pages. Make sure to use the same color scheme, font and layout across the entire website to ensure that your users don’t get confused and think they’ve accidentally been taken elsewhere. It seems silly, but it does happen. Remember, you’re catering to everyone, not just your ideal, tech-savvy customer.
[tweet_dis inject=”@donnaamos”]When your color scheme is too complicated, it can cause eye fatigue for site users, who will want to leave the website. Colors that are too bright or do not complement each other will draw the user’s eye away from your informative text and painstakingly selected photos. Similarly, avoid using color schemes that feature too many colors for the same reason. Often, a simple color scheme that primarily uses two distinct tones (for example, dark green and white), with two or three complementary colors used sparingly will suffice. White is by far the best color choice for text backgrounds as it minimizes eye fatigue and makes your text easier to read. White, being neutral, also looks appealing next to almost any color. It’s to website colors what black is to clothing- it goes with everything.
Rule 2: Choosing the Right Tool for the Job
No qualified carpenter would hammer nails using a screwdriver, nor would a seamstress sew dresses with a power drill. For web design, the tool in question is the software you use to design your website, and choosing the right tool is every bit as important for your site as it is for construction workers in the real world.
If you choose to go the route of employing a professional web designer, much of this work will be done for you, as a web designer with experience in graphic design and color will help you to choose a color scheme for your website. On the other hand, if you’re opting for the DIY route, you’ll need to use the best tools available to make your web presence as memorable as possible.
Check My Colours (spelled the British way) a software tool that you can use to evaluate the effectiveness of your foreground and background color options for those with color deficits.
Coolors is a fast color scheme generator that takes the hard work of choosing out of your hands.
Want to sit with your iPad to have some fun choosing colors for your website? Then ColoRotate is the perfect app for you.
My favorite Adobe Color Wheel it allows you to choose colors based on browse color palettes created by others. You can also create your own by using the color wheel, harmony rules, and color sliders.
The bottomline choose website colors that are appealing but do not compete for attention and draw the visitor away from the mission of your website.