The first thing you need to do with your colour scheme (see Rule 3) is to establish a couple of backgrounds.
By now, you will have done all the vital preliminary analysis. You will know what this new site is for, which specific visitors the site owner wants to attract and keep, what visitors will be doing once they get to the site, and so on.
If you are (in whatever spirit) keeping to my rules so far, you will now be in a position to decide two crucial backgrounds—the screen background, and the background to your 960-pixel-wide main area.
Of course both backgrounds can be the same, if that is the effect you want. And they can both be white. Once again, it’s a matter of what you want to communicate, who you want to attract and keep on the site.
I like plain white for the main area. I use it more often than anything else. On the other hand, if a site is complex, I sometimes use a different background colour for subsections. And I really like to experiment with the screen area—the area outside the site pages.
In the early days of the Web, designers played with all kinds of backgrounds for pages. These days, patterned backgrounds, dazzling gradients, bold colours are out of fashion, and unlikely to come back, since all our emphasis now is on usability and readability. However, there is a place for backgrounds which communicate a message—and that is in the screen area to either side of your pages. Here you can use gradients, images, patterns, anything you think will work. Since no text or other images will appear on top of this background, it is free for you to exploit for the most creative of effects.
Don’t neglect it!
