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Web page publishing gives you, as the creator, a great deal of flexibility and power when it comes to deciding how your work is going to be viewed, and colour is a very important tool for this. The colours used on your web pages will set the mood of your site, and determine how people will react upon seeing it. They will also decide whether or not people will be able to actually read your page, and whether or not those same people will ever be willing to visit your site again.

When making your website, you should always give very careful consideration to what colours you have chosen to use - too many colours, or poorly chosen colours and backgrounds can make your website look like it has been defaced by a deranged five-year-old with a new box of 150 crayons. Not that this technique is always bad - there may even be times when it is appropriate! Making a corporate website for a client, a resume, or even a site which displays your work for a class project however, is almost never that time. Remember, if you can't read your page after standing about five feet away from the screen and staring at it for five minutes, more than likely, nobody else will be able to read it either.

The simplest, and best rule to follow for choosing the colours you will use on your website was actually created long before the Internet, or even computers were invented. Long ago in Medieval Europe, knights and lords would decorate their shields to indicate who they were on the field of battle, and a complex set of rules regarding how this decoration was to be done came about called " Heraldry" - The first rule of heraldry is called the Rule of Tincture, and it was set up to define what colours should be used together on a shield, so that they could be certain to actually recognise who was who from a long distance. The last thing you would want to do is accidentally shoot your own commanding officer with a longbow at 100 yards, so the colours had to be very distinct from eachother indeed!

This same rule can easily be applied to web design as well, and following it almost always produces good results. First, there are two groups of colours - "Metals", and "Colours". The "Metals" group consisted of Yellow and White, while the "Colours" group held everything else. The Rule of Tincture states that you may never place a metal touching a metal, or a colour touching a colour. The idea behind this was that the strong colours or the light metals would blend into eachother at a distance, and become impossible to tell clearly apart. If you browse around on the internet, the vast majority of corporate or professional web sites follow this rule very closely. Noteworthy examples include Amazon.com, CNN, and even Microsoft.