Why should You care about your website colors?

By Radhika Venkata
Posted Sunday, September 26, 2004

**How Colors are Used in web design:**

Demarcates screen elements into groups- You can put a blue background for your navagational bar and white for rest of your page. This tells the visitor that the blue area has different elements and grabs his attention.

You can relate different groups of element on your screen- If you want to keep a navigational menu also at the bottom of page, you can use the same blue background. This tells the visitor that both blue areas on the screen has the same information.

Highlights information- If you want to make a line of text prominent, you can use different colored text instead of regular text or use a background for that line of text.

Looks nicer- Always colors associate with our mood and perceptions. We always feel the colors. Colored objects draws peoples attention.

**One should always use web safe colors?**

Nah... Unless your audience purely rely on 256 colored monitors. Mostly a remote possibility. You can experiment and enjoy in applying colors in your web design. The worst thing that will happen is the colors are shown to it's nearest color on 256 monitors. They won't look like exactly as they look on your monitor.

**What colors are best?**

One cannot say this exactly. Because the blue which means professionalism to some is death to some.

Here are some colors:

To indicate necessary action, use warm colors Red, orange, yellow.

To provide calm and content feelings use cool colors Green, blue, violet, purple.

Green means growth and vitality.
Red means energy and passion.
Blue means intuitive, cool and trustworthy.
Yellow means enthusiastic and optimistic.
Orange means courage and success.
Purple means passionate and spiritual.

Grays and browns seem dull. But they can take on a more cheerful attitude with compliments of red and orange. Emotions like this will help your visitors to associate your site with stableness and confidence.

**Tips to follow in appying colors on your website:**

1. White background is always preferable to keep your content. It makes easy to read and eye fatigue will be lessen with plain white background.

2. To make the things elegent use one or two contrast colors next to white. Like blue, green, orange etc.

3. Never use more than 3-4 colors on a page.(unless your site goes with graphics or other multimedia themes)

4. Check the colors and it appears on different browsers using online tools like- (http://www.anybrowser.com/)

5. Background of your web site pages: ALWAYS use a web safe color as a background color to your web site. This makes your graphics and text appear on a clean interface on any type of monitors.

6. Download and use this color picker for your web designs. Easy to use and very good free utility software:
(http://www.nattyware.com/pixie.html)

About the Author
Radhika Venkata
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