11.1 Design dilemmas

I fully understand the need for compatible and accessible design and I try to be cognizant of contrast when I choose background and text colors. With this in mind, I ran my header, logo, and navigation tab colors through the color analyzer at Colors on the Web. The header is a gradient that ranges from #80021F (burgundy) to #3C0303 (dark burgundy); the text is #DAD9C3 (ivory) and the logo is #181412 (dark brown). According to the results, my header/logo combination, although it looks contrasty enough, does not pass. The navigation text/header combination passes on all fronts, for small and large text. So this leaves me with a bit of a design dilemma.

In order to rectify the problem, I went into Photoshop and altered my logo colors using a slightly darker version of the ivory that I used for the main content box and the main navigation text. The results of the original and the ivory version look like this:

Original:

Lightened version:

The problem is that I'm not really happy with the lighter look and haven't found any similar combinations that look quite right against the header. I'll keep trying, but it honestly appears right now that using the darker color combination is the lesser of the two issues. I have used a light background and dark text in the content areas and light text on a dark background for navigation, so it's not like I have unreadable content. It's also not like the contrast makes the logo indecipherable for most people. Is it possible to leave that one element "out of compliance," so to speak? I'm on the fence right now.  

One other issue in my design lately has been that I set up a blog for Taste the World using Blogger. The intent was to route the blog to a special page on the Taste website. I thought this would make it easy for Anne to later add content to the website without having to update the site. Unfortunately, I didn't realize prior to creating a customized look for the blog (which actually took a long time) that Blogger was no longer allowing FTP transfers of content to websites. I guess this has been in place since last March, so I should have looked harder at publishing tips, I guess. Anyway, I will probably just link to the external blog from the website; this seems like the best choice right now. One thing I know you can do is direct the header link (which defaults back to your blog) to your own website. I can't for the life of me find the link portion in the code, however. I combed that code too, so I don't get the issue. Anyway, I have seen dynamic headers with multiple links, so if I have time I want to build a new template. I modified an existing template and added a custom header image, but a new template would be better (if time allows, as my list of additions and tweaks continues to grow).