COLORS FOR YOUR WEB SITE

by Joelle Steele

Before you design your Web site, you should learn a little about Web-safe colors and CSS3 colors, as well as how to use color to make your Web site easy to view and use.

COLOR SELLS

Every Web site design starts out with some basic information and some images that must all come together to create an effective marketing statement. One of the basic design features of any Web site is its color scheme. Color either sells - or not.

There are many psychological reactions to color and, as a result, some colors are better for selling certain products and services than are others. For example, you can expect blues to be best for businesses in general, but they're not all that great for food sites, because blue is an appetite suppressant. Reds, oranges, browns, and other warm colors are best for selling foods and restaurants, and they are also good for targeting male buyers. Pinks and purples are normally more effective for targeting female buyers. Primary colors as well as pastel pinks and blues are often used to sell children’s items. Greens are great for selling anything that is natural, such as plants, campgrounds, and some sporting goods. It certainly can't hurt to read up on the psychology of color to learn how colors affect people, especially as it applies to advertising.

WEB-SAFE COLORS

For some years now, there have been 216 colors that were always considered to be pretty much Web-safe or browser-safe. They usually appeared fairly consistent regardless of what computer system, monitor, or browser was used to view them. I first learned about those colors in 1998 after I discovered that my lovely plum-toned color scheme looked muddy brown on some other computers. After that, I always designed my Web sites with selections from the 216 colors on the Web safe palette (below).

But times have changed, sort of. But even now, there is still some controversy among experts as to whether or not it is even worth the effort to limit yourself to those 216 colors. Monitor quality has changed dramatically, and most PC monitors can now detect the same colors that the Mac does. Browsers are more compatible as well. And, those 216 colors don't really depict all that well on anything other than an old 8-bit card. However, on the other hand, we now have people browsing the Web on their cell phones, and not all of those devices have the ability to depict anything other than the 216 colors.

How do you decide whether or not to stick to Web-safe colors when they might not always be that "safe" anymore? Today, you have a choice: stick to the Web-safe colors, or take your chances and use whatever colors you like, or use the CSS3 colors (described later in this article). Nowadays, you're probably safe using whatever colors you like, and most of your colors will probably look the same on the majority of systems on which they are viewed.

In the table below are the 216 colors and their hexadecimal codes. Following this table are the CSS3 colors and some suggestions for selecting a color palette for your Web site.

WEB SAFE COLORS TABLE

W3C COLORS

What, might you ask, is W3C? It's an abbreviation for the World Wide Web Consortium, a collective of Web experts who work together to develop standardized technologies that increase the functionality of the World Wide Web. It is then up to all the various software manufacturers to voluntarily comply with those standards for the benefit of their users.

The following table, created from the list on the W3C Web site, indicates RGB colors supported by most browsers (some of these hexadecimal codes are also above in the Web-Safe Colors table). Indicated below are the W3C alphabetical HTML color names and their hexadecimal and decimal codes. Note that when using the HTML names in writing code, there is no space between the words, e.g., it is "IndianRed" and not "Indian Red."

W3C COLOR TABLE