I was curious what colors were being used by large, popular sites, so I decided to find out. Alexa.com maintains a list of the most visited sites on the internet. I wrote a PHP script to scrape the ten most popular sites and record all the colors used in the sites' home pages and style sheets.
I plan to re-scrape the data on a regular basis. Because of this, I'll keep analysis to a minimum, since it could become outdated when the data changes. Once I have data over a larger time period I'll be able to examine and graph trends in web development. I also plan to examine the difference in color usage between popular websites from different parts of the world.
The Sites
Here are the ten most popular sites, and the colors that they use. Duplicates were removed on a per site basis. However, if a site used the same color in multiple formats, each format is included. For example, if they used
.
#000, #000000, and black, each would be included separatelyColors by Hue
For the purposes of this chart, transparency was removed from all colors.
Colors by Format
Browsers recognize colors in seven different formats; hexadecimal, RGB, RGBA, HSL, HSLA, and predefined color names. Only 4 of the six color formats were used by these sites.
Colors by Hue and Then Saturation
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