Tired of boring white backgrounds, black text and blue links? Want something different? That's where Web coloring comes in. Web coloring is based on special "hex codes"- six-character codes that "identify" a color.

Here are the "hex codes" for the nine main colors.

#FFFFFF- white, #FFFF00- yellow, #FF9900- orange, #FF0000- red, #009933- green, #0033FF- blue, #CC66CC- purple, #000000- black, #CC9900- brown

There are a lot more color tags you can use. To find a list of the hex codes for 256 colors, click here.
Even more color codes than those exist!

How do you use these color tags? It's simple. First, if you want to put your entire page in a certain set of colors, you can put the hex codes in the <body> tag, like this. <body bgcolor="hex code" text="hex code" link="hex code" vlink="hex code">
The vlink="hex code" part sets the color of visited links, links on your page that the user has visited recently.
The bgcolor="hex code" part sets the background color (for the entire page).
The text="hex code" part sets the text color.
The link="hex code" part sets the color of links (entire page)

If you want to use special colors for parts of your webpage, you can do that, too.

The tag for coloring parts of a webpage


<font color="hex code"> Text you want in the different color</font>

Note: You can put whatever parts of your page that you want into different colors, and you can use several colors for several different sections of text.

If you use hex codes in your body tag, you can still put different sections of your page in a different color.
Remember, if you don't use any color tags you'll be stuck with the default colors.

You might be asking yourself "I don't want to remember these darned hex codes." I hear you. In the part of the tag where you normally put the hex code, you can simply put in the word for the color.

Web browsers recognize at least the following color words:


Blue Orange White Gray
Purple Green Black Brown
Red Yellow Cyan Magenta
Turquoise Lime

Please use aesthetic considerations when coloring your Web page. For example, yellow text on a white background does not look good. Yellow text looks excellent on a black background, by the way. Generally, dark text works well on a light background and vice versa.

Note: The quote signs and the number signs are easy to forget, so watch out for that!

Go to the next part, 'Images'.
This page © Alan Gilfoy, 2004-2006.



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