Use Contrast in your website's font and background colors!

Choose a dark color or black for your text and a light tint for your background color for optimum effects. Black on white is the highest contrast and it's standard. My website uses black on white, which does give a professional look and it's invisible. People don't notice that at all, they take it for granted.

However, I'm not someone who does HTML. I used a block building system to create my website and it didn't give me choice of background tints. Black on cream or pale blue or gray or green would be a little easier on surfers' eyes if they're reading page after page. This website uses black on cream, which is very easy to spend hours reading and typing on.

So when you're choosing colors for your website, think about readability first. Some things that work well in art do not function well for something people need to read. Use a standard, easy to read typeface and a strong value difference between the type and the background color.

White or light text on dark backgrounds is also effective. My blog has a theme with a dark background because I find that easier to read than dark on light, but that's a random personal preference. Fewer businesses use dark themes unless they cater to a specialty audience like a goth theme or music website. It may be the right style for yours -- but make sure the font is light and bright enough to read easily on the dark background.

Blood red maroon on black is not easy reading any more than pale pink on paler pink. Go for a bright eye-grabbing red for headlines and then go to gold or light gold for the text for a great look that isn't white on black. Or go to cool colors with midnight blue and the lightest blue in your palette, giving it a moonlight feeling.

Whatever you choose, it isn't what colors you've chosen that make the difference. It's that either the font or the background should be quite dark and the other quite light. Complementary colors like yellow and violet, red and green, blue and orange are attention getters. If they're done subtly, like maroon text on a pale green background, that can be something at once dramatic and easy to read.

Yellow on violet has a lot of contrast in itself because yellow is the lightest spectrum color and violet is the darkest. Unfortunately when both of those are pure spectrum hues, that can be too much color contrast, creating afterimages that jumble type and make the page hard to look at. Try muting the yellow to a pale gold and deepen the violet to almost black if you're going to use that one.

I hope these color and design tips are useful to you for designing your website! The easier your text is to read, the more readers are going to find and love your content! Enjoy building your site!