I've spent some time lately Designing for companies whose primary colors were Blue and I must say, Blue is a color I like on the web. I get frustrated with greys and browns that end up on the clients end being completely misrepresented as something that obviously doesn't help the design, from their remarks. However, Blue seems to be a color everybody likes. Psychology will tell us that ask just about anyone and their favorite color is blue. We do live in what seems like a blue world: From a spectaculr photo from ISS, or the website of a man who says he represents American Democracy (Obama - http://www.barackobama.com) right down to the opening window of my Photoshop. It's all Blue dabade daba da.

We all hear about the 256 web safe colors and last time I checked blue was on there. So how many sites out there use blue? 1000's maybe even more. I noticed the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/) just redesigned their site and their color of choice, Blue. Some other sites that use blue and it works well are: http://www.bartelme.at/, http://www.thinkswedish.com, http://emanuelfelipe.net/. 

So what does this tell you designers stop using Blue? No, if it works why fix it. But use it sporadically, I mean you don't want to show your portfolio to an Interactive Agency and it's full of Blue websites. You know its bad when the guys that live in the grey world(programmers) call you out on it. I tend to only use blue when the client absolutely wants it. If you are going to use it use something other than Hex:0000FF please! If you want to learn more about the color I'm sure you could find a Physchologist or Marketing person who could talk till your blue about how it makes people more productive or even feel better about themselves.

While researching the color Blue I did find a shade that's called electric indigo that I want to try in a future design.

Some Sites that I have used blue in the design are: 
http://www.livebetterindex.com/
http://checkoutblog.com/
http://otcsafety.org/