Green, red and purple can make a nice color combo—green and red are complementary colors and green and purple are part of a triad (the third color there being orange). Check out my article, The Color Wheel and Color Theory for a brief overview of those principles if you’d like. For a fresher look, you might try just lightening some of the colors. Be careful with red though—light red is pink!

Many web designers are moving far away from the Web 2.0 look (we’re tired of its contrived shininess). But there are loads of web design galleries out there for inspiration! Just a few off the top of my head are http://www.cssmania.com, http://www.bestwebgallery.com, http://www.styletheweb.com. You might also consider installing WordPress (this site is run on it, as are many other blogs). It’s not just a blogging platform; you can have only static pages like you have now. The benefit is that you can use free themes to customize the look of your site and it’s pretty simple to install.

I’ve been surfing the web for over a year now, looking for inspiration to update our farm website.

I lucked into a decent colour-scheme just by using the colours of the farm, leaf green, saskatoon purple and cherry red.

I’m happy with what I did back in 2005 but am looking for a way to update it to a lighter, fresher look. To me the site looks heavy and old-fashioned.

I’m also less interested in so much css styling. I’d like to simplify it, a Lot!

But, this is where my cognitive limitations run up against my computer chair time limitations and every April it defaults into tidying up the dead links and vowing that “next winter” I’ll clean up the whole site!

Should it tickle your fancy to blog about changing my heavy colours to a fresh “web2.0″ look, I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts.

Sue
~lost in a fibro-fog

people just use shades, or I don’t like what they’ve done, there’s too many colours in one scheme, too many of the schemes are so similar

That is exactly why I started keeping my own schemes! You’re right, I hadn’t thought of putting them into Photoshop palettes. But at the same time, I like to see where it came from because not all schemes work for all situations and it’s nice to have a working example. Kara (above) mentioned that with ColourLovers you can upload the image that inspired the palette. It would take a bit of time, but maybe that would be a great way to share these schemes and keep them accessible from anywhere for me.

Hehe, glad you like all the pretty colors!