Colors

The color of your website will play an important factor. You need a color scheme that allows all parts to be visible and improves the usability of your site. It also needs to be professional and set the right mood for your business.

Color Schemes

If you’d like ideas for choosing colors, here are some examples of different types of color schemes.

Complementary

This color scheme consists of two colors opposite of each other on the color wheel. Here are some examples:

color wheel with yellow and purple outlined

color wheel with blue and orange outlined

Triad

This color scheme consists of three colors equally separated on the color wheel. Here are some examples:

color wheel with blue, yellow, and red outlined

color wheel with green, orange, and purple outlined

Split-Complementary

This color scheme consists of three colors, one color and the other two colors are those on either side of its complementary color. Here are some examples:

colorwheel with green, red-orange, and red-purple outlined

colorwheel with blue, red-orange, and yellow-orange outlined

Tetra

This color scheme consists of four colors equally separated on the color wheel. Here are some examples:

colorwheel with yellow, red-orange, purple, and light-blue outlined

colorwheel with green, yellow-orange, red, and dark blue outlined

Analogous

This color scheme consists of colors next to each other on the color wheel. Here are some examples:

colorwheel with yellow-green, yellow, and orange-yellow outlined

colorwheel with red-orange, red, and red-purple outlined

Monochrome

This color scheme consists of different shades of the same color. Here are some examples:

colorwheel with red outlined, and a slice extends inward to show darker and lighter shades of red

colorwheel with blue outlined, and a slice extends inward to show darker and lighter shades of blue

Additional Considerations

Some things to keep in mind is potential customers who are colorblind. In fact, 1 in 10 men are colorblind. This is a fairly substantial size of the population. There are tools you can use to ensure that your color choices are distinguishable enough from each other for those who are colorblind. You should not use red text on a green background, or vice versa.
Resources to see how your chosen colors will look to someone with colorblindness are:
For websites: https://www.toptal.com/designers/colorfilter/
For images: https://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/

As well, there is a difference between how colors appear in print, and how colors appear on screen. They are two entirely different systems that use different base colors to create colors, so it is virtually impossible to create an exact replica on a screen of color from a printed logo. You can get close, but not exact.

One last thing to keep in mind, mainly if your business will serve those of different cultures, is that colors are subjective. Colors mean different things to those of different cultures. It is important to research color meanings of a culture you are planning to work with.

Not only are they subjective between cultures, they are subjective within contexts as well. For example, blue is normally seen as a calming color, but in context of food it can be off-putting. Most molds are a blue-ish color, so it can remind a customer of moldy food. Yellow can be a bright and cheery color, like the sun, but it can also be a warning color, such as with many animals such as snakes, frogs, and bees. Before you choose colors, you should be aware of the many contexts that they can be perceived as.

Thanks to Design for Hackers by David Kadavy for information on this topic.