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Dye-sensitized solar cells have attracted rapid interest over the recent years with prospect of emerging as a viable alternative to conventional silicon-based solar cells. Currently organic and inorganic complexes have been widely employed as sensitizers for DSSCs. One of the salient features of dye sensitizer is a strong absorption in the ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared part of the solar radiation spectrum. Light absorption and charge separation is performed by the sensitized dye molecules adsorbed on TiO2 surface. In this work, the time dependent-density functional theory was used to investigate UV-Vis absorption spectra of a series of polyene-diphenylaniline organic chromophores. The HOMO-LUMO energy levels, maximum excitation wavelength, excitation energies and light-harvesting efficiencies of selected dye molecules were simulated. The results showed that, the dyes with methoxy groups in their donor moiety show bathochromic shift and reduced HOMO-LUMO energy gap than the corresponding dyes without methoxy group. The results compare favorably well with other findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]