Can you imagine a world without color?  Pretty boring huh?  A website without color and special color effects is just as boring and lifeless.  Effective use of color in a layout or website design can improve the visual experience of the site viewer.  Aesthetically attractive sites are more likely to keep the attention of browsers than sites that are too bright, too dull or have unpleasant color combinations.  As a web designer, developing a complete understanding of color can enhance your designs and improve them drastically. 

Basically, color is defined by three properties which are hue, saturation and brightness or lightness.  For example, blue is the colors hue.  The saturation is its range of color from neutral to brilliant and the brightness or lightness is the color’s contrast or the amount of light that the color transmits.

Colors are divided into three main categories:

 Primary colors can not be formulated by any other combination of colors.  The primary colors are mixed to make other colors. 

 The secondary colors are created by combining primary colors.

 The intermediate or tertiary colors are formed through a combination of secondary colors.

 Black and white are not actually considered to be colors; however, they give tonality to hues and mixing black and white into a color scheme has a strong effect on the resulting color.  A mixture of the three primary colors will result in a black or dull grey.