Choosing Colors and Fonts for a Business Website
Design is not decoration. It is the part of your site that decides three things before a visitor reads a single sentence: whether they trust you, whether they can read what you wrote, and whether they can find the next step. Colors and fonts are where most of that gets decided, and most owners make these choices in the worst possible order, which is by liking something in a preview.
Color
Pick one primary color and make it do real work. A saturated primary reads as action, as a button, as a link. If you use it on every heading, every border, and every icon, it stops meaning anything and just becomes the background noise of your site. Reserve it for the things you want a visitor to touch.
The rule people skip is contrast. Text needs to stand clearly away from the background behind it, and there is a published standard for how much, called WCAG. The practical version: aim for roughly a ratio of 4.5 to 1 between body text color and its background. If your light gray text is on white, it fails. If a visitor would need to squint, it fails. Test it rather than guess, and check your links too, since links are where light gray gets used most.
Keep the palette small. One primary, one dark neutral for text, one light neutral for backgrounds, one supporting accent if you need it. Four colors, decided on purpose, will look more expensive than twelve picked from a template.
Type
Two font families is plenty. One for headings, one for body text. Matching families are fine, and using a single family at different weights is better still. The reason is consistency: every additional family is another voice, and readers do not have a great deal of patience for voices.
Body text should be at least 16 pixels. Line height matters as much as size; roughly 1.5 times the font size gives the eye a place to rest. Long lines of text are harder to read than short ones, so cap the width of body copy rather than letting it stretch across a wide monitor.
Decorative display fonts belong in a logo or a single hero headline. Inside body text they slow reading down and, above a few words, people stop reading. That is not a style opinion. It is a measurable drop in how much of your page gets read.
How to brief a designer or developer
The most useful thing you can bring to that conversation is a short written list, not a folder of screenshots:
- Your logo file, in vector format if you have it
- One primary color, named or in hex
- Two or three example sites whose feel you like
- Two you actively dislike, and why
- Your three most important pages, and what a visitor should do on each
Colors and fonts also have to coexist with assets you already own. Photography, in particular, sets a palette on its own. If your product photos are warm and neutral, a cold blue-gray site will fight them. Check the type and color against your own photography before you commit, not after.
And one last rule: a visitor should be able to tell what the site wants them to do within three seconds. If the primary color, the heading font, and the button style do not all point the same direction, no amount of polish will fix it.
