Color Codes Explained
To change the color of anything on your web page, the only things you need to know are the color codes and how to use them.

How to use them:

In the BODY statement of your HTML document, you can define eight things:

A typical body statement might look like this:

<BODY BACKGROUND="bgimage.gif" BGCOLOR="FFFFFF" TEXT="000000" LINK="FF0000" ALINK="FAA000" VLINK="12345F">

One interesting note, if you are to add the text BGPROPERTIES=FIXED to your body tag, Microsoft's Internet Explorer will fix the appearance of the background, so when you scroll down the page it looks like the text and other images are moving, but the background is not. This can be very effective if used correctly. Of course, this doesn't work with Netscape.

The color codes:
Using the color command is simple: there are 6 figures, and each of thesefigures range from 0 to F (not case sensitive). This means, 0, 1,2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E, F. "0" for any particular value isthe weakest and "F" is the strongest.

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 A B C D E F
weakest........................................................strongest

"## . . . . . ## . . . . . ##"
"Red . . . Blue . . . Green"

White is the combination of all colors, and black is the absence of allcolor. To make white, the command is "FFFFFF" and to make black it is"000000" The first two letters (if made strongest) would make the colorred ("FF0000"). The second two letters (if made strongest) would makegreen ("00FF00"), and the third two colors (if made strongest) would makeblue ("0000FF"). By mixing and matching these combinations of red, green,and blue we can mix and match any color you want. For example, yellow is"FFFF00" (red and green) and grey would be "555555" (the middle of allcolors, a mix of white and black, would make gray). The best way to learnhow to use these color schemes is to experiment by yourself with thebasic knowledge of the main colors. I have a short list of color codes in the frame on the left side of your screen. If you want a more complete listing, you can visit a more complete list of color codes.

Also note that can also write in the name of the color (i.e., blue, red, green) for all BODY color attributes. This will work the same way as writing in the hexadecimal code.

FONT Tags:
Another very useful way to change the color of your text, along with its size and even the font used, is the <FONT> tag. The main use for the font tag is to define text with a smaller or larger font than usual. The normal font size corresponds to 3; smaller values of number will produce a smaller font, and larger values of number will produce a larger font. If number has a sign (for example +1), the font will be changed relative to what it is assigned to already. The color attribute works the same way as it does in the BODY statement, but it only changes the color of the text inside the FONT tags.

A typical FONT statement might look like this:

<FONT SIZE=3 COLOR="0000FF" FACE="ARIAL">This is a test.</FONT>

which would produce this:

This is a test.

After playing around with the FONT tag, you will find that it is much more versital than the BODY statement, but you also have to think about what you're doing a little more. It gets much easier to get lost in a mix of colors and sizes.


other resources:

VisiBone Webmaster's Color Lab
ZSPC Super Color Chart


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