Now we come to the fun parts of web page design... where your creativity will shine.
I will break this section into
TWO sections....
BODY BACKGROUND COLOR
TEXTURED BACKGROUNDS
1. BODY BACKGROUND COLOR
Let's quickly look again at our plain document containing the basic HTML tags..
As it stands now the background would be white.. the text black as these are the default values in webpages
You have a choice of whether you want a textured background or to add a color background.... Your choices for the different colors are endless.. Your choices for backgrounds also are endless....
Let's talk about how to add them first and then I will give you some places where you can go and pick up neat textured backgrounds etc.....
So far we have talked about TAGS or as they are also referred to as ELEMENTS
Now each of these ELEMENTS can have what we call ATTRIBUTES which refers to their characteristics...
The BODY ELEMENT OR TAGhas attributes of either color or texture and an attribute of text color....
They must be added in a precise way, as is always the case in HTML....
For background color it is
BGCOLOR="----"
For text color it is
TEXT="----"
Where the dashes are is where you would add the color.....
Color can be added as a numerical value -(RGB) or as a TYPEWRITTEN VALUE...
There are 16 color names in HTML that are considered "widely" understood...
THEY ARE......(shown with true browser colors!!)
BLACK
SILVER
GREY
WHITE
MAROON
RED
PURPLE
FUSHIA
GREEN
LIME
OLIVE
YELLOW
NAVY
BLUE
TEAL
AQUA
Quite a RAINBOW huh???
And that's not all folks..
There are many more colors when you consider the RGB values..... There are 125 of these....Instead of typing in the color name you would type in the CODE LISTED in the columns....
You can go here
to see all of those colors, Then come back here to see how to add the RGB colors in for text and backgrounds..
How to add color in the BODY TAG...
CHECK IT OUT BELOW..... TEXT is also added in here using the same colors above...just make sure your colors are in good contrast to one another...
There is a space between the COLOR TAG and the TEXT tag...spacing is always important in HTML...
TEXTURED BACKGROUNDS
Now if instead of a colored background you want to add a textured background you choose the image file you want to use within the body tag....
HERE'S HOW YOU ADD IN A BACKGROUND IMAGE
<BODY BACKGROUND="clouds.jpg">
Here "clouds.jpg" would be a jpg file you have stored on your drive.....Watch your casing here i.e. type it in EXACTLY as it is listed....
Here are some links for some places to pick up background textures...
There are SOOO many choices out there...SOOO many sites to see... If you go into any SEARCH engine and type BACKGROUNDS FOR WEB PAGES you will get many hits.... Also if you're looking at someone's site and see a background you like..just hit the right button on your mouse It will save it on your hard drive for you.....
Before we move on we will discuss 2 more BODY TAG attributes and these are the colors of your links in your documents... For these you want to choose corresponding colors that match the rest of your document....They are specified as ALINK="---" and VLINK="---"
VLINK refers to the color the link changes to after a vistor has viewed the link.... By default Navigator and I.E. use a shade of purple "800080" for visited links...
Let's look altogether at a BODY TAG with all of these attributes in it....
Press on the sticklady to go back to the main menu...or go on to the next section which is.....
