Colors

Choosing a color scheme for your website can seem like a daunting task. So many to choose from:

Should you go with complementary colors to your product or logo? Should you go with the new celery green or pumpkin orange? Stick to your favorite color? Trust your web designer?

Color on the web is an ever moving target. One of the first things a textbook on web design or coding teaches is that there are web safe colors. These are the colors that are most likely to be produced true by current technology. What this means is that the colors that you agonized over for hours, and that your web designer has coded meticulously for you, can be rendered differently by a web browser. And in a matter of seconds your site goes from deliciously key lime to mucky green slime.

There are so many things that affect how a website is rendered. Sites look different depending on the screen type and resolution of the monitor. Different computers render different looking colors. Browsers affect how color is generated. User settings can make colors lighter, darker, or completely different.

So what can be done to keep that glorious key lime from turning into slime? Your web consultant may have some tricks up her sleeve. There are ways of keeping colors true overall that require a little tweaking to the choice of color and the coding of the site. But keep in mind that the user, your visitor or customer, is always ultimately in control. And that, after all, is what it is all about.