Choosing Colors
You may already have a color palette that you use for all of your branded materials – logo, business cards, letterhead, signage. These colors should be incorporated into your website where appropriate to create consistency between your online and offline presence.
If you don’t already have a color palette for your business, you can easily create one. Keeping in mind the websites that you like and don’t like, think about which colors best represent your business.
You don’t want to rock the boat too much with your website color scheme, and it will be easier for your website visitors, if your site contains colors that are expected for your type of business.
The Adobe Kuler website contains color palette submissions from different designers that are named and tagged so you can search or browse through different options. Each of the palettes contain six colors that work well together, and they can help you visualize the colors that can be used on your website.
Choosing the Right Fonts
For fonts, it’s easiest to refer to websites that you like, or you can always create an example in Microsoft Word. The fonts you’re most concerned with are:
- Navigation menus
- Headings
- Sub-headings
- Body text
- Footer text
The biggest decision you should really be worried about is whether to use serif fonts like Times New Roman or Georgia or sans-serif fonts like Arial, Verdana, or Tahoma. Combining the two styles can be used effectively when one style is used for headings and the other style is used for body text. Don’t try to be too cutting edge with your selection. Your visitors will expect to see something that is professional and inline with your business.
Your site’s colors and fonts play a large role in the usability of your website so it’s important to pick ones that are easy for your target audience to use.
Next up is putting everything together to create a high fidelity website design mockup of your main web pages.
Previously, I wrote about creating wireframes to capture the layout and structure of your site to help with visualization.
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