Anybody who has put together a website knows how a designer can agonize over the seemingly small components that make up a complete site such as font size, layout and colors. It's all a matter of balance. A few things out of whack can make your entire site a strain on the eyes, visually unpleasing or downright ugly.

Firstly, you have the aesthetics of your website to consider. Are you going for a light or dark color palette? Pastels or vivids? Is your design based around contrasting or complementary colors? Is your site business-based or personal? Do you want a website with a classic or modern feel? A couple of good resource with which you can explore different color combinations is Color Scheme Generator 2 and Color Blender. These are very useful tools which will help you see how the different combinations relate to each other side-by-side.

When it comes to colors, many people mistakenly assume that only 256 colors, known as the websafe color palette, should be used. While this may have been true at one time, it is no longer the case. We do need to keep in mind, however, that when you're designing a website, you're designing for monitors, not print. A number of distortions in color can take place in a browser itself, as well as within compressed images when you go outside the websafe color palette.

That being said, computers have come a long way from 28.8kbps modems, 14 inch monitors and 8-bit graphics cards. The use of more advanced technology now allows us to utilize a wider range of colors. According to Browser Trends, most Internet users - approximately 87% - have 24-bit or greater displays (16 777 216 or more colors). Only a minority - approximately 12% - have 16-bit displays (65 536 colors) and an extremely small number of users - approximately 1/2% - are still using 8-bit displays (256 colors).

While this is great news for web designers everywhere, there are a few important points to keep in mind when choosing colors for your website. Most new PCs do have enough video memory for high color-depths (24-bit or more) but are set lower because they default to a lower color-depth. To be safe, we should assume that 87% of Internet users are NOT fully using their graphics cards capabilities, although their computers are capable of doing so. This is expected to slowly change as people become more familiar with their PCs.

Check your display settings before you start designing. Are you getting everything you can out of your graphics card? Once you start designing, be sure to check how your colors are displaying in Internet Explorer as oposed to other browsers. You will notice that color schemes you choose will often display normally in Firefox and Opera but can be noticeably different in IE. Another method of checking how your colors are displaying is to check your website on several friendss computers. Don't assume that if your color scheme looks okay with your monitor that it looks that way to everybody.

Does this mean you should stick to a websafe-only color palette? No, it doesn't. It's a matter of personal preference. If you want to play it 100% safe, go with the 256 color model. But we suggest occasionally busting out of your box and experimenting with a higher color-depth to find out which colors you can safely use and which you can't.