How To Choose A Color Scheme For Your Website?

Colors do have a special meaning for your website visitors. They create an emotion that keeps your user engaged for as long as he is surfing your website. A non-verbal communication that lets your visitors feel comfortable and relaxing is what colors are all about. They set a tone for your website, keep it calm, and carry along a plentiful feelings thus prompting your users to take an action.

This article is intended to help users on how to choose a color scheme for your website and since it is really an imperative part, you must follow a professional’s advice. Also, I will try to cover up a few tools that are helpful for the designers when choosing a color scheme.

There are two ways you can do this – DIY method (if you have a good eye for it) or hire a designer. But, in an approach to find perfection, you might make several mistakes which an expert won’t. So, we highly recommend leave this task to a professional designer only.

Important Considerations:

What kind of products your website sells? My motive to say this is that – colors in your website should engage a particular niche customers, a targeted community for whom your website has been designed.

Does your color scheme need to sync your logo or an existing color scheme? For many businesses, this is an important consideration that their color scheme should reflect the branding.

What kind of images or graphics will you include? Any graphics or images that you are going to use must match up with your color scheme. Photos or graphics can actually become a great source of inspiration for your visitors.

How To Choose a Color Scheme For Your Website

There has been a huge debate on this question, but good designers recommend using only three theme colors on a website. The more colors you use, the harder it gets for the designers to keep things balanced and create a consistent look.

60-30-10 Rule: This is a basic rule to understand the scene behind the riddle of colors. The rule has been used by fashion designers for several years and fits well for website designing as well.

It says that you should combine three colors in the proportion 60:30:10.

Let’s go in deeper…

• The 60% ratio will be of the primary color which will set the tone of your website.
• The 30% ratio (a contrast color) should match up with the 60% to create a striking effect.
• The 10% ratio should contrast with either the primary color or the secondary one.

However, in modern designs, it is recommended to pick neutral colors (black, white, gray etc) as your primary or secondary color; since they can easily match up with any color thus offering a great flexibility for you to choose the other two colors.

Tools That Can Help In Choosing a Color Scheme

COLOURlovers: A design community that offers access and information to various color themes through an engaging session with other people who are also color lovers.

Kuler: This is a flash based library introducing several color themes. Although, you will need an Adobe account to use Kuler, but it will not cost you a single penny.

PHOTOCOPA: This is a product of COLOURlovers, which allows you to make up a palette depending upon colors extracted from a digital photo. Also, it incorporates many handy tools for color creation of your choice.

But the final decision will be all yours! Hope you liked this post…Any suggestions or ideas will be highly appreciated.