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The web safe
colours are the 256 colours you can find in every graphic program (as
well as
in many other
programs) as the default palette. These colours are safe to use in
the sense
that every
browser will display them the same way. It is also these colours the
.gif formats
supports.
Luckily, you
are not bound to use only the web safe 256 colours but do keep in
mind that the
further you
get from the original colours the bigger the risk of the page not
looking the same
in all
browsers. Therefore, a good advice is to leave the wildest
experiments to the graphics. |
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The best
starting point is always your top graphic. This can be either a logo
or a header holding
the site's
name. Whether you have made it yourself or got it from the Net is
irrelevant. It is the
graphic
itself, or rather the colours in it, that is important. It is these
colours you have to work
with as I will
demonstrate here.
Let's take the
header graphic on this page as an example. Look at the colours. How
many can
you see? Well,
there is actually quite a few but at least three of them are
noticeable: Blue, pink
and red.
However, none of these three is pure. They are a mix of other blue,
pink and red
shades.
Now take a
look at the text. What colour is it? Well, I call it Satin but it is
actually a dark toned
pink. And pink
was one of the three colours in the header graphic. The bar below the header
graphic is
next to be looked at. There is a thin, bluish line, a dark toned red
dot and an almost
flesh toned
red text.
Blue and red.
Again colours found in the header graphic. (To be honest I think the
text is a bit
too light, but
that's my headache). Let's now take a look at the emblem to the left
of the header
graphic. As
you can see it is mostly red. The two letters are very light blue
with a greenish tint.
Green? Hello,
that's not in the header graphic!
No, it isn't.
At least not as far as we can se. So why the green? Why not yellow or
white? Well,
green can be
used since there is no other colour between green and blue. White
could also have
been used
since the background is white. Yellow is out of the question. There
is no yellow in
either the
graphics or the text therefore using it would create an unwanted distraction.
You can use
more than three colours as long as they all are represented, one way
or another,
in two or more
places. Text, graphics and background should all be a part of a unity
and work
together to
make the site look great. Using colours too far apart or totally
different colours in
different
graphics will only look messy. It is also important to use the same
colours throughout
the site. |
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The colour of
both text (and links) and background is specified in the <BODY>
tag. When
specifying
colours here you can only use the names (red, blue etc.) for the most common
colours. For
other colours you will have to use hex values. The hex values are
series of six
digits and /
or letters preceded by a #. The hex value for this text colour is
#800040 (hex = hexadecimal)
This is what
the <BODY> tag looks like (without any colours specified):
<BODY
BGCOLOR="" TEXT="" LINK="" VLINK="">
When I have
specified the colours for this page (and all the others in this site)
it looks like this:
<BODY
BGCOLOR="WHITE" TEXT="#800040"
LINK="#800040" VLINK="#1C8ADB">
As you can see
the background colour is specified using its name, but I can just as
well use the
hex value for
white which is #FFFFFF. Note also that I have the same colour
specified for both
text and link.
Visited links I have set to be displayed in a light blue tint.
If you (like
me) are not so familiar with the hex values here is a link to a very
useful colour chart.
Colour chart here!
If you need
additional help with HTML and such post your questions in the help forum |
