Choosing Effective Site Background Colors

[engine]

We've all seen sites with horrendous color schemes, especially in the early days of the web.

Black background and white text is not pleasing on the eye, yet it may work well with a graphics heavy site.

Due consideration should be given to usability and disability issues.

What are the ways to go about choosing an effective color scheme today?

[bill]

I used to experiment with various colors in earlier website designs, but now I have become downright conservative. Ease of viewing has replaced my desire to experiment with non-standard visuals.

I'd be interested to know of any good ways to choose color schemes. I used to start with web-safe colors for the base and go from there. These days we don't have to be so limited in terms of colors.

[tangor]

Having grown up with BBS (that thing BEFORE the "web") Ansi style colors (16 with black as the background) is so retro--though I miss it. Worse, I go back to green screen... revealing my age in computers...

LCD monitors these days render significantly different than "old time" CRTs... suggest opting for pastels for all color combos... Webmasterworld these days (though we can't change it yet but Brett and Co have promised to get it back) is an example of how to do it right.

Also bear in mind that a percentage of the population is color blind. Some combinatons of color and text will be unreadable. Do your research in that regard. Meanwhile, explore. Just remember that bright back and strong fore tend to work better than anything else.