Create a Colour Scheme for your Whole Site

If your company has a logo or preferred colours on its stationery that's a good start, however for those of you starting from scratch, choose two or three complementary colours and stick with them - don't change colours on every page. The most common colour schemes include:

• Red, yellow and white
• Blue and white
• Red, grey and white
• Blue, orange and white
• Yellow, grey and white

As you can see, the most dominant colour is White - people like it because it shows the site is clean, attractive and easy to navigate.

If you're not sure what colour scheme to choose, use one of the many available colour scheme chooser programs/sites on the web. We recommend ColorBlender simply because it features thousands of ready made colour blends, easy to view, easy to use.

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Backgrounds

Ensure your visitors can read the text on the background, e.g. no black writing on a dark blue background or yellow on white.
 

Background colour should be a single wash and have plenty of contrast with the text. Black - or dark grey – text against a white background remains the most sensible option.

Avoid patterns behind text, it becomes unreadable when viewed in a browser.

By spacing out content units and blocks of colour you’ll help guide the eye to key areas. It is more likely that lightly-coloured landing pages with one brightly coloured ‘buy now’ button will convert better than a page featuring a mess of colour. Make that button stand out!

Get your background wrong and you can be heavily penalised by Search Engines. They associate dark text on a dark background (or as worse, light coloured text on a light background) as a method used by spammers. Your could end up being blacklisted just because you wanted to be "artistic"!!

Link Colours

The default for links in most programs is blue (before being visited) and burgundy (after being visited), so if you have a dark background, ensure your links are light.

The vast majority of websites change the colour of a visited link to help users navigate. So should you. Maroon is a common choice for clicked links. Avoid applying these settings to your main site navigation.