It’s your website, you pick the colors. Who am I to say pink is a bad theme color for a website, especially if that site was a flower site. Building websites does require a artistic touch, and one rule of the artists is “If it is your work, you can do whatever you want.”
Don’t Make Them Blind Though!
Free to do whatever you want is great, but don’t blind your visitors doing it though. Using colors like pink, yellow, green, and black all on the same page is not good. First, it will hurt your visitors eyes, and second it has no unity. Using the site Portugal Web as an example, you can see a wonderful example of how to use colors.
Three Good Rules
There are three good rules you should know when picking colors based on one theme color. The first is, the rule of three. Try to stick to just three main colors based on your theme. There are all sorts of studies on the number 3, and what it basically boils down to is that things start getting complex after 3. So, to keep your site simple, try to just use three. Don’t worry about having black text. Black isn’t a color anyhow.
The second rule is to choose colors on the color wheel that are on either side of your main theme color. This is what the Portugal Web site has done. They have picked a shade of green, a lighter shade of green, and one darker shade of green. They have basically applied the first two rules, and successfully created an eye pleasing site.
The third rule is for if you don’t like the second rule. If you don’t want to use all like colors, then you should use opposites on the color wheel. In the case of the Portugal site, they could have used Green with the contrast of Red. It may not sound like a good mix, but it will have the least strain on the eyes.
Consistency
Many of my posts are about site consistency because I believe it should be one of the most primary rules in web design. Consistency in color schemes should not be excluded, and in fact should have a higher priority than many aspects. Visitors quickly look for visual clues without even reading, and the use of color is one of the greatest methods.
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What I read here is quite a smart way to deal with such an important topic which is the choice of colors for a website. Indeed makes a big difference when one visit a website where a good choice selecting the colors was done. Thank you very much I will have your article in mind on my web design work!
That Portugal site is nice. I like the mix of solid greens with the fancy green background images.
Yep, I think they did a great job with the colors. I just wish it was a little wider, and that they would correct their paragraph format. Currently their paragraphs are formatted with justify, a common mistake.