You like color. No, you love color. Your home has orange walls, brick red walls and even a few lemon yellow walls. Your business has purple and hot pink walls. People love all that color and you’ve decided to bring your vibrant palette to the online world. Your business website is not going to be like all those blue, gray and muted green websites everyone else has. You can’t wait for the customer compliments to begin.

You barely have the site up and running when the first call comes in. Unfortunately, instead of heaping praise, the customer tells you the site is hard to read. A second customer strolls in the door and tells you that while he loves the store, the colors on the site are so bright he actually developed a migraine. Wait a second. You used the same exact color shades on the site. What is going on here? There are several reasons your customers could be objecting to your bright hues:

• Different browsers interpret the same color differently. A nice pale yellow site may appear garishly yellow on one browser and greenish on another.
• Monitors are hard on our eyes when we read black text on a white background. Throwing hard to read colors into the mix increases eye strain.
• People simply have different tastes. What appeals to you may be unattractive to someone else. Since the customer is always right, it is better to have a business site with neutral colors.