Friday, December 30, 2005
Web Page Colors
I want to make my site look interesting and professional.
The original color scheme was a light blue backdrop, a dark purple navigation area with yellow links and white headings. The main content area was white and large so looked very busy with all the text and links.
I thought about keeping this color scheme but in the end I decided to get rid of alot of the white area. Also, even though I felt the colors worked, I decided to move away from the bright colorful look and go for a dark, classy look.
So I am making the background black. The content area will still be white but in a central column. The navigation will be a grey column on the left. The main navigation links are white with teal colored sub links which will expand out according to which main category you are surfing.
I also added mouse-over color changes in the style sheet.
It's important to have a white background for the content are since this color converts best to sales and is just like 90% of everything you read offline such as books and newspapers. Also, images are easy to add to white backgrounds and avoid problems around the edges of the image.
Dark backgrounds emphasise colors and are fun to work with in the areas outside the content area. Backgrounds can look good with a repeating pattern, I tried it with some pixels in shades of grey to give a silver effect but I found that my links were distorted by the pattern. To get around this, I added a solid grey backgound behind the links. But in the end, I decided not to have a silver/grey site.
The original color scheme was a light blue backdrop, a dark purple navigation area with yellow links and white headings. The main content area was white and large so looked very busy with all the text and links.I thought about keeping this color scheme but in the end I decided to get rid of alot of the white area. Also, even though I felt the colors worked, I decided to move away from the bright colorful look and go for a dark, classy look.
So I am making the background black. The content area will still be white but in a central column. The navigation will be a grey column on the left. The main navigation links are white with teal colored sub links which will expand out according to which main category you are surfing.
I also added mouse-over color changes in the style sheet.
It's important to have a white background for the content are since this color converts best to sales and is just like 90% of everything you read offline such as books and newspapers. Also, images are easy to add to white backgrounds and avoid problems around the edges of the image.
Dark backgrounds emphasise colors and are fun to work with in the areas outside the content area. Backgrounds can look good with a repeating pattern, I tried it with some pixels in shades of grey to give a silver effect but I found that my links were distorted by the pattern. To get around this, I added a solid grey backgound behind the links. But in the end, I decided not to have a silver/grey site.
