Help with Design

I'm a noob when it comes to designing, but not to coding. I am wanting to make a website, but the design is costing way to much. I have photoshop and everything, just not the skills. I am blue green colorblind so, designing might not be my thing.

I am just looking for some pointers because I think sites look good either dark or light, but I always to seem to just make it way way to dark and screw it up, or make it really really light, and again, screw it up. I have been told to do cheaper jobs to get some experience in designing but, I want to only do that as a last resort. I'm just looking for pointers, tips, or tricks. Stuff like backgrounds, boxes, shadows, lines, stuff like that.

Some of the colors I love on websites, are: Red, and White, with another color. Or Green, Blue, and a dark gray.

I have been looking around a lot of other websites and in the gallery showcase for some inspiration but it just doesnt come.

Sincerely,
Jordan Martin
Seraskier

Color blindness will definitely make it harder for you to choose a color scheme. I think one of the things that will help you most will be finding a good piece of color selection software. Personally, I use Color Schemer Studio. I don't use the automatically generated schemes that it comes up with (although they can be useful for inspiration), but some of its features like the analyzer provide vital info about contrast.

Making sure that you have a nice high contrast between text and background will probably help out a lot. Other than that, I don't really have much advice to give. I've never studied color theory, so most of my color choices are based off what looks and feels right to me. It might be easiest for you if you can find someone whose color choices you trust to help you out. Thankfully for me, my girlfriend was an art major, so whenever I'm completely at a loss I just go get her opinion.

I usually spend a good hour looking around other websites and looking how they are put to gethere, what content, images, fonts ect. look good when put together, but usualy coulor always depends on what type of site your making, ie. clansite are usualy dark, where as business sites tend to be better when they are clean and lighter as it makes a client/cusomer feel more welcome.

To start with i spent about a week looking around tutorial sites and deviantART finding out what things went well together and how they are structured.

Originally Posted by George the Flea I use Color Schemer Studio.

hey thats a pretty cool program, thanks for introducing me to it

It's amazing what some people will spend money on, especially when this is available for free
http://www.wellstyled.com/tools/colo.../index-en.html

There's also Adobe Kuler http://kuler.adobe.com/