The question that has risen lately regarding the importance of using a browser safe palette is completely justified. Keep in mind one thing though: the web safe color palette was created years back when most monitors only supported 256 colors. What this translates into is that if you use a color that’s not browser safe it could end up looking very ugly on the monitor it’s displayed on.
If you don’t know who is viewing your site, you won’t know they will look for the people reading them so eliminate the risks and use browser safe colors.

The only thing you need to remember is that browser safe or not, ultimately it’s your choice.

Use colors that are located next to each other in the color wheel better known as analogous colors. They can be used to create relaxing color schemes which are relaxing and pleasing to the eye. By manipulating the hues and the saturation you can achieve incredible results using only the same two or three colors. Try starting with combination such as green, yellow-green, yellow or red, red-orange and orange.

As we all know every single thing or concept has an opposite. The same is true for color. There are called complementary colors and are situated on different end of the color wheel diameter. If you want to catch someone’s eye this is the way to go. Creating great contrast, these combinations are brighter and more vivid. You can start by using red and green or blue and orange and then take it from there.

If you still found you find yourself faced with a conundrum then turn to nature. As is the case with most things, Mother Nature holds the patent. The natural colors that surround us are usually harmonious and pleasing, even though they don’t always respect the color theory. For more information look up Judy Litt’s library of color combinations for the Web.

HTML uses 4 color keywords as follows aqua, black, blue, fuchsia, gray, and green, lime, maroon, navy, olive, purple, red, silver, teal, white and yellow. Sounds fairly simple doesn’t it? Well before you get to excited you should know that there is a second list of keywords first introduced by Netscape, which was the first browser to support color keywords. As if this wasn’t complicated enough spellings comes into action. What I mean by this is that Internet Explorer is very picky when it comes to the way we spell gray or grey. No matter what the name is or who first introduced them, color keywords are a big pain in the “side” (if you don’t know what you are doing, that is).
A second way to define colors is by using numbers. Right off the bat CSS 2 provides us with two ways of specifying colors as numbers: RGB and Hexadecimal RGB.
RGB color numbers
RGB stands for red, green and blue and every other color is obtained by mixing these three colors in different proportions. There are two ways in which you can define a color in RGB: the first way assigns each of these three colors a number between 0 and 255 e.g. rgb (255, 0, 0) whilst the second uses percentage values e.g. rgb (100%, 0%, 0%).
Hexadecimal color numbers
Are the same thing as standard RGB color numbers just converted in base-16. What this means is that every number is formed by three pairs of numbers which take a value from 00 to FF. In this case the color red becomes #ff0000.
CSS color numbers
A more complex system of defining colors by numbers is presented in three categories by CSS 3:
-the transparent keyword
-RGBA color values
-HSL color values
The transparent keyword evolved from CSS 1 to CSS 2 and then finally reached the form we now see in CSS 3. What this mean is that the keyword can be used in any property that has anything to do with color.
RGBA color values simply mean you can set the opacity of the color on a scale that ranges from 0.1 to 1.0. In practice this is achieved as follows :

rgb (red, green, blue, opacity)

Some browsers don’t recognize the last value, the one used to define the opacity. In this case theoretically the color should return to fully opaque. In practice however there is a different story: the color value is completely ignored.
HSL color values
RGB has two major problems that need mentioning. Firstly, in order to display the colors RGB assumes the CRT color model which can lead to problems when trying to print something. This translates into a poor printing on some ocassions because most printers are based on CMYK. Secondly RGB is non-intuitive. This means that while people think of colors in order of hue, saturation and lightness, RGB sees colors in a machine generated way.
In order to adress this problems, HSL color values define hue, lightness and saturation by assigning them numerical codes. For instance red in HSL would be written hsl (0, 100%,50%). Although HSL resolves this problem it too has a drawback in the way that it’s not supported by most browsers.

Web designers have a great arsenal at their disposal in order to create great Web pages, and a big part of this arsenal is formed by colors. What most of them don’t know
though, is how to influence on a subliminal level the people that read their Web pages. The first and most important criteria on you select your colors is your audience. Is it a Western audience, an Eastern one, is it composed of younger people, older people, males or females? All of these things factor in when you make the color choices for your site.

If you create a Web page that is meant for a specific group of individuals, be very careful of the cultural differences involved. The meanings of colors vary from culture to culture. What is OK in one culture may be tabu in another one. The symbolism is also different. For instance in the Eastern cultures the mourning color warned at funerals is white whilst in the Western ones, black is the color of choice. So if you find yourself creating a page for an Asian audience, don’t use a lot of whites, because it could be disturbing.

The same principle apllies to age differences. Children and teenagers are suckers for bright intense colors so if your page is in shades of grey and mellow color you will score points with the parents but loose your intended audience in the blink of an eye.

As long as money dictate the way things happen around the world there will also be class differences. Studies have shown that working people tend to prefer colors that are tangible, that can be referred to by simple common names such as blue, red green, yellow and so on. Wealthier people, and people with a higher level of education tend to prefer colors which are more exotic like taupe, azure, mauve, lila etc. Think about this for a minute before making any misplaced comment about what I’ve just stated: why do think Walmart has a logo that is bright red?

Last but not least the age old question of men and women. When was the last time you went into a single man’s living room and had the surprise of seeing it decorated with shades or orange and yellow? The cold hard truth is that, from this point of view men and women weren’t created equal. Women are more color sensitive, and as this wasn’t enough, western men are also more likely to be color blind. Men in general prefer cooler colors such as browns, greens, blues, while women are more attracted to warmer colors such as reds and oranges.