Feminine Color
Colors are connected to certain associations, this is something to keep in mind. Red is a color associated with danger and it is very intensive, therefore you shouldn't make it the dominant color if you want to create calm, reliable atmosphere. Pink is a very feminine color so you better use it in websites related to children and women. Blue is the most popular color when it comes to website design because it represents calmness and reliability. White is the most popular color for a background, although many websites use black and dark backgrounds.
The problem with black color is its intensiveness and that it is sometimes represents darkness and evil. Combination of black background with very bright colors may result in very unbalanced ,really bad looking website. Although, there are some cases when designer can create quite a good looking website despite the demand for black background. If you considering making your website black I suggest you take a very good designer because black emphasize all the other objects of the website, specially if they are bright.
Combining colors in your website can be a hard task. There are number of free websites which may help you matching website colors, like Color Match. I suggest you don't use more than three or four colors in your website so it won't look amateurish. If you want to add a picture to the header , select the website colors from the picture.
Be reasonable in color choosing. If you own a beauty shop , don't color your website gray or black. If you have a law firm, don't make a pink or orange website.
Be aware that some people are color blind , and some people have vision problems so make sure to have enough contrast between the text and the background so everyone will be able to distinguish between them.
Caution , Copyright! Finding beautiful images is very easy today, all you have to do is enter Google Image or one of the large image banks. Unfortunately for the website owners, most of the pictures are copyright protected, and using them can cause you thousands of dollars. You may think , since your website is small and relatively anonymous no one will find out. You should not count on it , today, technology allows finding content on the net very easily, so I suggest you don't take risks, pay for your pictures or use the pictures from your Website Building Provider.