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The best way to avoid dithering is to optimize your site colors. The best way to optimize your colors is to use the colors in a 216-color palette. By designing a site with this in mind, your site will appear, as it should to all of your visitors.

Colors evoke a broad array of emotions, and influence decision-making process every day. By using these nonverbal clues to your advantage, you can influence how your visitors feel about your site.

Use colors that are not too jazzy and flashy but are easy on the eyes. Your site should be as simple as possible – not all shiny and gaudy. Ensure that your chosen color scheme can be over-ridden by the user's browser settings. Some people have eye conditions that mean they can read only black on white, while others can read only yellow on black - if your design is flexible, everyone will be able to read it.

Choose a background that is a single, solid color. If possible, avoid loud textures, patterns or images. The choice of background and foreground colors is not as important as the contrast between the background and the text. A simple way to check this is to take a screen shot of your proposed page and use a graphic editor to convert this into a gray scale image - by removing color from the image you will be better able to judge if the level of contrast between background and foreground colors is sufficient.

Apart from the color, your text font and format also play an important part in communicating with your visitors. Here are some tips pertaining to the text format to be used for your website.

* Avoid, if possible, the use of graphics in place of actual text. Text size and color can be changed by the user's browser settings, but a graphic is fixed, and can't be changed in this way.
* Avoid large blocks of italic text - this can appear 'wobbly' on screen, and is difficult for many people to read.
* You don't have to use large font size on your page. Standard (medium) size text is fine - visitors to your site can adjust the text size to suit their needs by altering their browser settings. However, ensure that you use relative font sizes in your code, not absolute font sizes. Some browsers can't over-ride absolute font sizes.
* Don't underline large blocks of text. Some people find underlined text difficult to read. In addition, since underlining usually indicates hyperlinked text, it can be confusing for users if it is used where no link exists.

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