3 Reasons Your Website Colour Scheme Sucks

One of the most important parts of the design of your website is the colour scheme.  A site with a cohesive look won’t distract your readers, allowing them to concentrate on your kick-ass content.   So does your colour scheme help or hurt your website?

Here are 3 things that guarantee that your colour scheme sucks.

1. You don’t have a SINGLE main colour – Your website is full of brightly coloured things that clash or bash your readers eyes when they arrive.  Instead of using a riot of colours, choose a single main colour, either your favourite or one related to your site title, like my LusciousLime.com colour – #F2F5DB – a light lime green.   Having a SINGLE MAIN COLOUR gives the eyes of your readers a rest, allowing them to concentrate on your content.
2. You think every element should be it’s own colour – H1 titles should be hot pink, H2 titles should be orange, links should be bright royal blue and all pictures should have a 10px giant brown border.  You get the idea.  In my opinion, you shouldn’t use more than three colours for your site to help you keep the visual distractions minimal.  A site with a multitude of non-complementary colours will only serve to confuse readers as they try to find the content in which they are interested.   Choose only TWO secondary colours using a colour scheme generator like the Paletton tool.
   • Use the Paletton colour wheel tool to develop your own colour scheme.  With it, you can create:
     • a monochromatic colour scheme – a variety of shades of one main colour
     • an adjacent colour scheme – uses colours adjacent to your main colour on the colour wheel
     • a triad scheme – the tool uses your main colour as the starting point and then gives you two other colours equally spaced out on the colour wheel
     • there are two other options, but I only recommend using 3 colours max!
3. Ignore white space – In conjunction with a pleasing colour scheme to help readers focus on your content, you should also have plenty of white space to give the readers eyes a rest.  Having a zillion items crammed into the space on your webpage only serves to further frustrate readers and prevent them from coming back.  Judicious use of white space allows the eyes to relax and can help highlight the important content you are trying to have read!

A well-though out colour scheme will encourage your audience to focus on your content.  By choosing a single main colour, two complementary colours and using lots of white space, you will create a better experience for your readers, which will encourage them to come back time and again for your great content!