Bruce's Web Lab

Working with Page Colors and Background Images



Web Page Colors

Colors can be added to your web page using the BODY tag.

As a reminder, here's the skeletal HTML structure of any web page:

<HTML>

<HEAD><TITLE> ... </TITLE>

</HEAD>

<BODY>

[This is where the contents of the web page go -- between the <BODY> and </BODY> tags.]

</BODY>

</HTML>

The BODY tag can take the following color attributes:

where "rrggbb" is a hexidecimal number that tells your browser how much red, green, and blue to mix together.

To add these features, a BODY tag might look like this:

<BODY BGCOLOR="#FF00CC" TEXT="#000000" LINK="#E52E0F" VLINK="#E516D0" ALINK="#0EE5E0">

Since we don't tend to think of colors in terms of hexidecimal numbers, here are a few web sites that give you the hexidemical code for a broad range of colors:

Background Patterns

Another possible attribute of the BODY tag is BACKGROUND="<image file>", where the image file is, as always, a gif or jpeg file. Your web browser interprets this attribute by using this image as a tile to fill the entire background of the page. That is, the image is repeated from left to right, and from top to bottom, until the page is filled.

Pattern Land by Ryan Scott of NetCreations, Inc
About 450 patterns (8 to a page) -- clicking on a pattern builds a sample page using that pattern
Julianne's Background Textures
200 patterns (20 to a page) -- clicking on a pattern jumps to a page using that pattern
The KPT Backgrounds Archive
About 50 patterns on 3 pages -- most are quite nice, but many in my opinion would make text hard to read
Backgrounds Abound by Heather Champ
One page with about 30 patterns



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