Design
How to choose colours when you have no eye for it
Colour is where most self-built sites go wrong, and it is one of the easiest things to get right if you follow a couple of rules instead of your instincts.
Use three colours, not seven
One dominant colour, one neutral for most text and backgrounds, one accent used sparingly for the things you want clicked. That is the whole system. Nearly every site you admire is doing exactly this.
Let the accent mean something
If your buttons are the accent colour, nothing else should be. The moment a heading, a border, and a button all share the same bright colour, none of them is a signal any more.
Start from something real
Rather than picking colours in the abstract, take them from something that already belongs to your business: your truck, your product, the brick on your building, your logo. It gives you a palette that already fits, and an answer when someone asks why.
Contrast is not a preference
Light grey text on white is the single most common mistake in self-built sites. It looks tasteful on a bright laptop and disappears on a phone outdoors. Run your combinations through a free contrast checker; body text should be dark on light or light on dark, without cleverness.
Consider not using much colour at all
Black, white, and one strong colour is a legitimate, confident choice, and it is much harder to get wrong than a palette of five. Restraint reads as expensive. It also survives being printed on a business card.
Two things to avoid
- Gradients everywhere. They date fast and they make text hard to read.
- Pure red for anything routine. People read red as an error or a warning. Save it.
The check
Look at your site on a phone, outside, in daylight. Then look at it printed in black and white. If it still reads clearly in both, the colours are doing their job — which is to organise attention, not to be admired.