Why Doesn’t a Website Look Stylish? How to Fix the Overuse of Colors

You may carefully choose every color on a website yet find that the finished page feels visually inconsistent rather than stylish. One possible cause is not simply the number of colors, but the use of different colors for elements that serve the same purpose. This article uses a cooking-class information page to show how to reduce unnecessary variations while keeping photographs, lesson details, and the booking process clear.

Before removing colors, find places where the same role has different colors

Begin by sorting the colors currently used into five roles: backgrounds, headings, body text, booking buttons, and decoration. If the lesson-introduction card is pink and the schedule card is blue, even though both are equally important, visitors may wonder whether the colors signal different meanings. Likewise, if one “Book a class” button is mint and another button with the same action is peach, it becomes less clear whether one action is more important than the other.

Rather than deleting all colorful elements, start by using a consistent color for a consistent role. Give information cards a common background and use the same color for buttons that perform the same booking action. If different states really need to be distinguished, such as “Full” or “Registration closed,” also write those states in words rather than indicating them through color alone.

Vivid colors and multicolored designs are not inherently poor design. They may suit a children’s event or an energetic campaign. The idea of a “stylish” appearance also depends on the audience and the page’s purpose. For this example, we want the food photography to lead and the lesson information to be easy to follow.

Before and after: simplify a cooking-class information page

Before the changes, imagine a page with a butter-yellow overall background ■#FFF0C7, a pale pink lesson card ■#F4DCE9, and a light blue schedule card ■#DDF0F7. The very same booking action appears on both mint ■#71CBB5 and peach ■#EBA57F buttons. We will address both the many competing background colors around the food photos and the inconsistent colors assigned to the same action.

After the changes, both the lesson and schedule cards use white ■#FFFFFF. Their headings and text, rather than arbitrary background colors, explain what the sections contain. Booking buttons consistently use deep green ■#20644F and include the words “Book a class.” Terracotta ■#BC7954 serves as an accent color (a color used sparingly for emphasis) on short decorative lines, not as the sole indication of available places. The point is to clarify the relationship between each color and its purpose, not to reach a rigid target number of colors.

Check text, button labels, and boundaries in the finished layout

The original mint button ■#71CBB5 with white text ■#FFFFFF has a contrast ratio of approximately 1.92:1. White text ■#FFFFFF on the peach button ■#EBA57F reaches only about 2.05:1. In contrast, the revised deep green button ■#20644F with white text ■#FFFFFF reaches about 7.01:1. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 generally require at least 4.5:1 contrast for normal-sized text and 3:1 for large text. Matching the button colors is useful only if the labels remain readable.

On the white cards ■#FFFFFF, the deep green heading ■#273C36 has a contrast ratio of about 11.76:1 and the dark body color ■#354841 about 9.75:1. However, the white cards ■#FFFFFF and surrounding off-white page ■#F7F4EE differ by only about 1.10:1. Where a visible card boundary is necessary, use a muted gray-green border ■#687A70. Its contrast ratio is about 4.56:1 against the white card ■#FFFFFF and 4.15:1 against the outer page ■#F7F4EE. Essential non-text visual boundaries generally need 3:1 contrast against adjacent colors.

Finally, arrange real food photos and information together and check the page at smartphone width. Can visitors follow “Check the schedule → Choose a class → Book a class”? HueRoll lets you examine the HEX (hexadecimal color code) and related colors of a selected color and save candidates in My Palette. Its contrast feature compares a selected color with white or black only; it cannot automatically compare any two arbitrary colors or judge WCAG AA/AAA. The paired-color contrast ratios in this article were calculated separately.