Web Colors

Colors on the Web are indicated by hexadecimal* color codes. Each code has the form #xxxxxx, where x is a number zero through 9 or a letter A through F. The first two values indicate how much red is in the color, the second pair indicate how much green and the third pair how much blue. This gives you thousands upon thousands of possible combinations.

For example, #AAFF33 is medium red with maximum green and very little blue and looks like this text; it's commonly called yellow and you can specify it either way. The body text of this section is coded #00FFFF: no red with maximum green and blue; the high numbers FFFF mean it's bright, especially against this dark gray (#333333) background. It follows that #FFFFFF is white, and #000000 is black. If you have a frontal cortex (which is light pinkish gray, #D6CCCC) this should not be too hard to learn.

One can also use the following named colors:  white ,  black , red, green, blue, aqua, yellow, teal, brown, orange, pink,  gray , purple,  magenta , tan,  chartreuse . Some browsers also accept compounds such as "lightgreen" or "darkblue" along with other names -- however, these are not universal and may result in your page(s) looking rather strange. As you can see from this demonstration, the background and surrounding colors affect the perception of colored text, and low-contrast combinations (like purple on dark gray) just don't work.

In general, it is easier to work on light backgrounds, but if you want to make bright graphics stand out, darker colors can help. Most people find dark text on light backgrounds easier to read than the reverse. Sitemaker recommends that unless you are well schooled in color palettes, you stick with dark text and high contrast.

You should also consider the effect of graphics when choosing your text and background colors. The "smile" graphic at the top of this paragraph was prepared with a transparent background, so it has the same appearance on any background color (in most browsers). The puzzle piece from Sitemaker's Editing Suite was prepared for a white background, so it has an unintended appearance on this background color.

To be compatible with old browsers, you need to use either the standard named colors or colors whose red, green and blue pairs all are doubles, e.g., #88EEFF, not #A3E9J5. This gives you a palette of only 256 colors, but virtually all browsers can understand it.

If you experiment, be sure to look at your pages in several browsers, e.g., Netscape on Windows and Explorer on Macintosh, to see how others see you.