To begin designing a web site it is very important to use the correct background color, text color and fonts to achieve professional looking results. This article will explain the basic guide lines on how to build a professional website.

When choosing web site colors limit your choices to 1 to 4 maximum. If you use more then 4 colors your website will look non professional and a nuisance very quick for your visitors. It is best to design your web site using customer friendly pastel colors. Most people designing their first website will get caught up in all the cool things you can do with computer graphics, fonts and colors and go way overboard resulting in a poor web site design.

For a better understanding on how colors and fonts work together, we suggest you check out PageTutor (opens in new window) to see how background colors and font colors look like when used together.

We suggest you keep your main background color light by using either 1. White #FFFFFF 2. Light blue #F1F1F1 3. Light yellow #FFFFCC. A light background provides a instant professional look and is super search engine friendly, the GoogleBot prefers white backgrounds (little known secret ). The goal is to make your web site easy on the eye's while pleasing the search engines too. If your site colors are harsh visitors will leave right away (I know, I sure do!). Be careful choosing your font colors and backgrounds. It is best to use 'soft pastels' and dark font colors.

Ok, let's move on...

When choosing font styles, it is best to stick with the 4 MAIN common default fonts on your computer, they are...New Times Roman, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif. You can use other fonts or custom fonts if you choose. Note: When using custom fonts remember they will not render correctly on other computers that do not have your custom font. When this occurs, the computer will default to one of the following fonts...New Times Roman, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif. So, make sure your website is tested using default fonts when using custom fonts.

EXAMPLE 1: Dark Green background with yellow font - Hard on the eye's

This would be considered a very bad background and font color. The result is overwhelming, you could use a white font to help improve the reading of the text, but the green is still to vivid of a color.

EXAMPLE 2: Light background with dark font - Easy on the eye's

Light, background and dark font color creates a very clean professional web site, making this text easy to read!

EXAMPLE 3: Default Font styles and colors. These fonts are similar in appearance and can be used with any web site you would like to design.

This is a Arial font size14: Arial and is very common on many website's.

This is a Sans-Serif font size14: Sans-serif, also, very common.

This is Verdana font size14: Verdana, looks nice, not as common.

EXAMPLE 4: Font styles not to use. Some people choose fonts they like, we recommend that you don not use certain fonts for full text pages. The font 'Forte' is very difficult to read and understand when used with a lot of text.

Forte font is not recommended. Imagine a web site using all Forte fonts it would be very hard on the eyes. Can you you read this easily? The answers is no. Make your website text easy to read and understand.

Top Ten Fonts: Arial, Frutiger, Futura, Gills Sans, Helvetica, Lucida, Optima, Palatino, Agfa Rotis, and Univers.

Conclusion: It is best to use light colors for the main body of your web site while using dark colors for text, header titles, dividers and borders.