Super-Easy Web Design Color And Graphics

It’s easy to start a web site, but difficult to design it. Don’t worry, there are good free tools at your disposal available right now that will take care of these little details.

Color

What colors go with what? I couldn’t tell you, but Color Scheme Designer will. Pick a color style (triad or tetrad are good choices), then click a color in the wheel or box and you’ll get four colors that work with each other at top right. Click “Light page example” at bottom to see a preview once you’ve found the colors you think work.

Hovering over each box at top right will give you the hexadecimal code needed to input into your web design.

Hexadecimal code is a hash symbol (#) followed by six alphanumeric characters. For example, #FFFFFF is white, #000000 is black, #FF0000 is bright red, etc.

Even if you’ve never used hexadecimal code before, when you see it you’ll at least know what it is. Many WordPress themes have the ability to insert color codes, and what they use is hexadecimal.

If you want a simpler example of where hexadecimal is used, if you use Twitter and customize your profile page, it also uses hexadecimal.

Color Scheme Designer is free.

Graphics

The easiest powerful graphics editor I’ve seen is the pixlr editor. This is all in-browser and it amazes me how well it works.

If you’ve never used an image editor before it may seem a bit daunting, but it is better than GIMP as far as ease of use is concerned – no question there.

If pixlr editor is a bit too difficult, you can go very basic (but good) with picnik. This is primarily a photo editor and isn’t as feature-rich as pixlr is – but it is very easy.

The best thing about both pixlr and picnik is that they require no signup or registration. Just load and go. Both are free.