One of the first things you need to concider when you are designing yur website is the color scheme. Once you decide on what colors you want to use and where you are going to place them the rest will normally fall into place with a little more planning. Choosing the wrong colors though can cause you to have a bad looking site no matter how good the rest of your design is.

Pay Attention to Contrast.

First of all, before you do anything else, you need to check that the colors you’ve chosen provide enough contrast for your text to be readable. Don’t put orange text on a yellow background, or red on blue, or anything like that. You should especially avoid using a lighter version of a color on top of a darker version of that same colour, or vice versa. You’ve got to make sure that your text is readable.

Never Use Black Backgrounds.

You can generally use whatever colors you like as part of your color scheme, but stay away from black backgrounds. It makes your website look ‘underground’ and threatening, not to mention old-fashioned. The only people who will like it will be dyed-in-the-wool computer nerds and people who get headaches from large areas of white.

Not Too Many Colors.

You should choose no more then four colors for your site, and use only those colors (or shades of those colors). You can’t go using the whole rainbow without the design looking garish, and garish is never good. Decide ahead of time which three or four colors you’re going to use, and stick to it, if you want to add one, you have to drop one of the ones you’ve already got. My personel choice is to use only two colors for the main body of the site, usually I’ll use white in the text areas with black text and another color around it or for the side panels. People are used to seeing black text on a white background and their eyes will automatically go there when your page loads.

Complementary Colors.

These are colors that are opposite each other on a color wheel, and so look good together, at least according to color theory. The three most common sets are red-green; blue-orange, and yellow-purple. Whether you agree with this or not is up to you, but it can work surprisingly well, especially if you use subtle shades of the colors.

This is also a good way to pick colors that will be easily readable against a certain background: look for the exact opposite color to maximise readability.
You can view a color wheel at http://www.fiber-images.com/Free_Things/Reference_Charts/color_wheel.htm to see a full range of complementry colors.

Analog Colors.

Another approach to try is to pick colors that are similar to your main color, meaning that they’re near to it on the color wheel. Red, for example, goes well with its analog colors, orange and yellow. Overdone, this can make your site look overly bright, but it can look good with restraint. It’s no coincidence that these combinations often occur in nature.

Chromatic Colors.

My personal favourite technique is to use colors chromatically. You use different shades and hues of one color in your design, and nothing else apart from black and white – for example, you might use light blue, bright blue and dark blue together. This creates a sleek, professional look, and comes highly recommended.

Take Colors from Nature.

If you’re lacking inspiration for a color scheme, one of the best things you can do is go for a walk outside. Take a look around at plants, flowers and animals. I once based an entire design on a photograph I took of a cat, and it turned out far better than I would ever have expected. Nature knows how to use colors better than you do – learn from it.

Color Blindness.

Finally, it’s worth dropping in a note here about color blindness. Try to make sure that your design uses color to make itself aesthetically pleasing, but doesn’t rely on it for anything essential. You wouldn’t believe the statistics for the prevalence of color blindness (some say as high as 10% are at least partially color blind), and you need to consider these people too when you’re designing your site, they’re at least as important as the people with unusual browsers, for example.

You might like to take a look at your site using www.vischeck.com, which will let you see things the way a colour blind user would. Make sure they can at least still read your text!