14 Tips on how to optimise the use of colour within your website
10% of the people visiting your site will have some form of eyesight difficulty, colour blindness or similar issue.
The following is a checklist which will help you design websites that are suitable for the widest range of users possible:
1. Try to make sure you have a strong contrast between the background colour and overlaying text colour within the website.
2. Any backgrounds behind website text should be solid and plain – no patterns.
3. It is not a good idea to indicate certain fields using colours.
4. Employ colour coding very carefully. You should use no more than four main colours within your website, and ensure that they carry from the landing page to the end page.
5. The best combination available for readability is using black text on a white background.
6. If your core audience are elderly or are looking at your website page for a long time, then try to use brighter colours within the design.
7. In order to easily distinguish different colours, you should use darker blues, reds and purples but paler greens, yellows ad oranges.
8. When you must use two colours alongside each other to distinguish different aspects of a website, make sure you don’t use red alongside green, or blue alongside yellow.
9. Don’t use greyscale or grey text for diagrams which contain critical value.
10. Avoid blue for small text or diagrams with thin lines – the blue receptors in the eye are less numerous than receptors of other colours.
11. Some colour pairings can cause headaches, phantom shadows, perceived vibrations and other optical illusion type situations for your visitors.
12. Always avoid pairing colour chart opposites (e.g. blue and red) and high chroma colours (e.g. blue and yellow).
13. A good tip is to evaluate website pages in greyscale and then in black and white. This can allow you to make sure that the persuasion architecture of the site holds under the manipulations, and isn’t relying solely on the colour scheme.
14. Never just focus on colour. It’s also important to take into account the lines, shapes, lightness, darkness, shading, blank spaces, textures, patterns and more.
For more information on professional website design, please contact Varn today.
