Color Usage in Website Designing

Submitted by: articlesmantra

In order to website design visually appealing you must maintain a color scheme because without a proper color scheme the page will lack personality. A properly balanced color scheme will provide your web pages with a well balanced personality. Too much usage of color or inconsistent color schemes will prove you to have a confused personality.
You can also use different colors for different pages but only if the colors are used in a similar manner. In that case the consistence would be in the treatment of the color rather than the actual colors. While designing a professional website there are a certain things to be kept in mind regarding colors:-
Enough usage of color – while website designers designing a web page they must use sufficient colors as too little usage of colors will make the site too dull. You can use colors to identify or differentiate items. Using colors through CSS is a good idea as it is cheap and easy. And if you do not use sufficient colors then the site needs something else to catch the eye of the viewers.
Use of white space – while designing a web page it would be advisable to leave some white space for the content as white is the best background for reading text as it is clean and soothing. While reading text too much color will hamper the vision and also cause irritation to the reader’s eye. Also white areas stand out from the darker shades and the content is more noticeable.
For the main content – now even if you put other light colors for the smaller content it is better that you use pure white the lightest tone for your main content as that is what is traditional and that is what people expect.
Use of intense colors – you must use intense colors in certain areas to attract the attention of the viewers. Use of much too many colors in too many places will attract the attention in various directions leading to a confused effect and losing the effectiveness of the use of colors.
Intense color in contrast to dull images – make sure that you do not use too intense flat colors in contrast to images with dull colors as this will create a striking contrast and the images will lose their importance and look too dull.
Do not use too many colors – use of too many colors may look hyperactive. There are some colors that go well together naturally while others clash constantly. This mostly happens when the colors are placed adjacent to one another. Dark colors look good when placed adjacent to lighter greyer backgrounds.
Draw inspiration from nature – Luke Wrobleski a regular website blogger argues that many corporate company websites try to keep the conventional touch in their websites and so they end up using the same color schemes and thus it becomes extremely monotonous. And so he states that one must use more creative colors.
He also says that since most websites are built maintaining the conventional layout styles so it is the use of color schemes that differentiate each site from another. And one way to use a unique color scheme is to take inspiration from the colors of nature.
Limitations of using colors (color blindness) – some people have impaired ability of differentiating certain colors. This is called color blindness and it can be of different types. The most common type of color blindness is a problem with differentiating between red and green.
So you should not use colors in such a way that one needs to differentiate between the colors to use the website interface. To avoid this make sure that all the information available in color is also available in non color areas such as context or mark up. Another point is that you should make sure that the foreground and background colors are sufficiently contrasted to enable a clear viewing for those that have such color imparities.