Colour definitely makes a difference to a website – it brings it to life and often adds to the professional look and feel. But sometimes people get it wrong and the way that colours are used make the web copy virtually impossible to read.
It seems that people think red writing attracts attention – that’s true, but try and read more than 3-4 words and your eyes will start to play tricks on you. Red is one of the hardest colours to deal with on screen.
I’ve already been on my soapbox about pale writing on a dark background, but another real challenge to readability is where two fairly bright colours are next to each other of similar tones (depth of colour). The usually end up screaming at each other and the reader can’t bear to look. This means any web copy in the vicinity hasn’t got a chance of being read.
Colour can enhance web copy – it can also destroy it – be careful!
