Web Site Success

Color talks!

Home page design is both art and science in the same way that putting together a quilt calls for intuition and skills. Selecting color combinations to please the eye and to carry your message is a challenge made easier by a few guidelines we rely on everyday as we design Web pages.

Your eye discerns value before it reads the color of an object. In many ways value is more important than color! Value describes the lightness or darkness of a color. Consideration of the value of a color is used in every step of designing both a quilt and a Home page. In fact many traditional quilts, such as an appliquéd Baltimore album quilt and a pieced Lone Star, depend on high contrast to create a distinctive design with foreground and background. The more you understand about how to consciously use value to build a better Web page, the more satisfied you will be with the results.

Let’s consider some Web page examples. Readability is one of your primary goals. All text needs to have a strong contrast (value difference) with the background to make it readable. If you create a medium blue navigation button with a medium yellow text, your visitors will not be able to read the text on the button. By making your navigation button dark blue with a light yellow text your visitors will easily find the button, allowing them to move around the site. Likewise, many “wallpaper” page backgrounds, whether texture or color, interfere with readability. Busy page backgrounds are the mark of amateur-created Web pages. Keep the background in the background.

Color can be an ideal way to convey the theme of your Web site to visitors. What color or combination of colors will communicate your message? Keep it simple. The colors should flow naturally from the content or theme. Lime green is a color newly popular. Several of our clients had us design their contemporary Web sites around a bright lime green. A bright lime green with accents of bright orange would not be appropriate for a Thimbleberries-themed Web site. For the uninitiated, Thimbleberries enthusiasts are fond of muted greyed colors with little value contrast.

Color conveys the central theme of a Web site on many of the Web sites we have developed. A sophisticated theme is suggested by the subdued use of color at Terrell Designs ( www.terrelldesigns.com  ). Subdued color in the logo takes a backseat to the contents of the slide show of rooms with elegant pieced Roman shades. Bright colors for the title and the navigation buttons at Quilt Hawaiian ( www.quilthawaiian.com  ) were pulled from the quilts in the logo area to tell the visitor to expect vibrant, lively quilts and quilt patterns. Because red, green and yellow were traditional colors used in quilts of the mid 1800s these were the colors we used to suggest the vintage reproduction theme of Piecing the Past ( http://www.piecingthepast.com/ ). The limited use of color at Alice Wilhoit Designs ( http://www.alicewilhoit.com/ ) highlights the exquisite applique border used in the sidebar and top logo area. Your eye is drawn to the quilting pattern itself and to the spots of color of the appliquéd flowers and of the navigation buttons.

Understanding these guidelines will help you carefully choose colors. Use value contrast to assure readability of your Web pages. Count on color to speak your message.

Paula Mariedaughter and Jeanne Neath are Web designers specializing in Web sites and e-commerce for quilting and sewing related businesses. For help with your Web site contact the authors through phone 1-479-677-2235, voicemail 1-888-671-0636, e-mail paula@quiltprofessionals.com , Web site: www.quiltprofessionals.com .

Reprinted from SQE Professional January 2007