Trust me.

These are NOT good colors to use as the background for your website/myspace page/blog/whatever.  Personally, I’m not much in day-glo pink or hot pink.  Generally not much of a pink person.  However, normal shades of pink don’t have me screeching and hiding my face, screaming, my eyes.  my eyes.

However, this shade of pink and this shade of pink should never, ever be used as a fricking background color.  It’s too much. As an accent, worked into the color scheme…hey, that can work.  I’ve seen some people use bright colors very well.  But as the background color?  As in… 99.99 % of the color on your site is so bright it scorches the retinas?  And then make matters worse, snow-blinding white is used as the font?

A lot of us spend a great deal of time looking at computer screens.  That tires the eyes out.  Fatigued eyes don’t handle overly bright colors very well.  They don’t handle blinking flashing things well, either, but that’s not today’s rant.

When I’m curious about a book, I check out the author’s site.  If I find something about the book on the site that interests me, I buy.  But that’s assuming I actually make it thru the website to find the info about the book.

You go and flash that shade of pink at me, or an equally virulent shade of green, orange or yellow, I’m not going to search out the book.  The only response you’re going to get from me is for me to run away, click away, whimpering in pain and determined to never, ever visit the site again. No book is worth the headache that comes from colors that bright-yep, I’m talking actual headaches just from lingering a few seconds on a site with too much in the way of wicked bright colors.

Now I’m not expecting everybody to bow down and cater to my wishes or my overly strained eyes.  However, considering that a lot of people…like, oh say…readers…tend to spend a lot of time using their eyes, for things like work, blogging, reading, checking out author websites/myspace pages/whatever, chances are a lot of them also have eyes that are already strained.  Already overworked.  So I say it’s safe to say that if I’m having that reaction, quite a few readers are, too.  Is clicking away really the reaction an author wants?

Those bright, vivid colors may look awful pretty when you’re laying out your page, but pretty isn’t going to score you a scad of hits.  Which could end up costing you some readers.  It certainly kept me from checking out yet another author’s site.

Now I’m going to go try and do something about my singed retinas…