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Whether your new website is going to be a site showcasing your new business, a blog talking about your favorite interests, or a site that shows off your own creative work, how it looks is important. Color is one of the biggest factors in how websites are presented, and choosing the right palette is one of the first steps in making a site that looks great and is also easy for your visitors to read and use.
Color is (Almost) Always Down to You to Decide!
Whether you are designing your own website or using a professional like this website design Cheltenham company, you are likely to have a part to play in picking the palette, as unless you want to leave the color scheme entirely in the hands of your designer (which is a viable option, but only really one for those who have no idea what they want to do at all), you’ll discuss this with them and have some input as they suggest palettes.
Branding
If you are making your site for a business, you may already have some brand elements, such as a logo. If you don’t, you will be needing these, and while it is good to have grayscale versions of all your logos to use as well (for example on printed things like newspaper ads or flyers), your logo will most likely feature some color. Even if you are just making a blog for fun, having a logo and some branding makes it more memorable and professional looking. If you already have some branding elements, you can use the colors in these to help drive your website palette. If you do not and plan to add them later, then you can actually do things the other way around and let your website color scheme drive your branding. Whichever way you do it however, they need to either complement each other, or contrast in an attractive way.
If you choose to use the colors of your logo for anything on your site, also make sure you use the exact same shade (find out the hex code if you don’t already have it – there are tools to analyze this on the web) – don’t just guess it by eye.
Readability
If, using your own ideas or some of the great palette picking tools out there you have a color scheme in mind, you need to check that it creates readable pages. Some combinations of text and background are very hard to read for anybody, and others are hard when you have certain common forms of color blindness. Make sure you test for accessibility before implementing your color scheme, or get your web designers to do this for you.
Finding a color scheme that reflects your brand and taste and can also be used to make easy to read, accessible web pages is not as easy as some people think, so don’t be afraid to play around with some tools or seek the advice of your professional web designer once you have a key color or theme in mind!
