5. CHANGE THE COLOR OF YOUR TEXT AND BACKGROUND

It's relatively simple to change the colors of your text, backgrounds and links. It's not so easy, however, to ensure that your visitors are not faced with a page that provokes, at best, incomprehension, or, at worst, grand mal seizures.

We've included as examples the codes for the default color of each of these page features -- background, text, etc. The tag to change the color of your page background has the following format: <BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF">. The default background is white. The tag to change the color of your text is formatted as: <TEXT="#000000">. The default text color is black. This will all make sense when you look at the color chart below.

The tag to change the color of your links is <LINK="#0000FF">. Since the default color for a link is light blue, you will have to change the color of your links if you switch to a light blue background. The tag to change the color of an active link (i.e., a link at the moment a visitor runs the cursor over it) is <ALINK="#FF0000">. The default color for an active link is bright red. Finally, the tag to change the color of your visited links is <VLINK="#800080">. The default color for a visited link is purple.

Color Codes

HTML recognizes colors as a set of combined values, with each value represented by a number or letter in a six-digit series. The first two digits are used to establish the strength of the red values in the color combination, the second two are for green and the final two are for blue. (The numbering system for each value is called hexadecimal, which means that each digit represents a number ranging from 0 to 15; the numbers 10 through 15 are represented by the letters A through F.) This system allows for combinations resulting in millions of possible colors and an infinite degree of confusion -- so play around with them and see what you like. You'll probably find it easier to just stick with some of the more common color combinations while you're starting out:

Key Color Combinations:

#00FFFF - aqua
#000000 - black
#0000FF - blue
#FF00FF - fuchsia
#808080 - gray
#008000 - green
#00FF00 - lime
#800000 - maroon #000080 - navy
#808000 - olive
#800080 - purple
#FF0000 - red
#C0C0C0 - silver
#008080 - teal
#FFFF00 - yellow
#FFFFFF - white

Now that you've learned some of the basics of HTML, you should try out your chops on creating a sample document. Say, for instance, the one we guide you through in "SoYouWanna design your own web page?" Or, if you're just too bored and distracted right now for any more larnin', get out on the web and check out what some other designers have done. If you want to go back to that site with the farm animals, that's fine with us. Consider it research.