Guides · Design & planning

Colour, contrast, and readability (starter basics for owners)

Updated 2026-07-05 · Practical guide for NZ small businesses

WCAG contrast ratios are a helpful baseline even if you are not targeting formal certification.

Quick checks without tools

  • Grey text on white backgrounds—often fails in practice.
  • Thin fonts at small sizes on mobile.
  • Colour-only status indicators (bad for colour-vision deficiency).

Brand colours vs usability

Keep brand accents for headers and buttons; keep body copy high-contrast. You can be on-brand without low-contrast paragraphs.

Dark mode considerations

If you ship dark themes, re-verify contrast—inverse palettes are not automatic mirrors.

Frequently asked questions

Do we need an accessibility audit?

Helpful for larger sites; start with automated scans plus keyboard tests either way.

What about marketing hero images with text?

Ensure text is readable without relying on busy backgrounds—or move text to solid overlays.

Putting this into practice on your NZ website

This guide sits in our Design & planning collection. The goal is practical advice you can act on without a computer science degree. Start with one change, measure whether enquiries or usability improve, then tackle the next item. Small businesses across Auckland, Wellington, Hamilton, Christchurch, and regional New Zealand face the same constraints: limited time, real customers, and a website that must earn its keep.

For Colour, contrast, and readability (starter basics for owners), the highest-leverage move is usually to align your live site with what the guide recommends, then fix anything that blocks Google from crawling pages or stops visitors from contacting you. If your site runs on WordPress, many of these tasks are configuration and content work rather than custom development.

Document your starting point: note current enquiry volume, average page speed from PageSpeed Insights, and any errors showing in Google Search Console. Without a baseline, improvements are guesswork. Revisit the same metrics after 90 days—SEO and UX changes rarely produce overnight miracles, but sustained progress should be visible in leads and user behaviour.

Share this guide with whoever maintains your site—an employee, a contractor, or your hosting support desk—so terminology and priorities align. The FAQ section on our main site answers common project questions if you are weighing a rebuild versus incremental fixes.

Before committing to changes, run your current site through our free website checker to see speed, mobile usability, and basic SEO signals in one report.

Not sure what pages you need? The website blueprint generator walks you through scope and structure in a few minutes—useful when briefing a designer or comparing quotes.

When to involve a web partner

Some tasks—migrations, checkout changes, security incidents, or a full redesign—benefit from experienced help. If you are comparing providers, look for clear scoping, realistic timelines, and measurement tied to business outcomes rather than vanity metrics. Our team builds and maintains business websites nationwide; explore relevant services below or request a quote when you are ready.

A good partner will ask about your customers, geography, and capacity to publish content—not only colour preferences. Review our recent website projects for examples of brochure, WordPress, and ecommerce work across New Zealand.

Related NZDH services

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Authoritative further reading

These independent resources complement this guide. Search engines and customers both reward accurate, helpful information—we link out where official documentation or regulators explain the topic better than a generic blog post could.