Section 42. Set the Page Colors and Background | Sams Teach Yourself Creating Web Pages All in One

42. Set the Page Colors and Background

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

6 About Proper HTML Coding

In the Page Colors and Background dialog box (after you have the text and link colors set), you can use the same dialog box to set the background image and background color of the page.

42. Set the Page Colors and Background

1.	Choose a Background Image If it's not already open , choose Format, Page Colors and Background to display the Page Colors and Background dialog box. If you want a background image for your page, you can browse to one and add it to your page. In the Page Colors and Background dialog box, click the Choose File button. Using the familiar Windows navigation system, browse to the image file you want to use as the background for your web page. The file must be either a JPG or GIF if it is to work in most browsers. TIP In general, background images make your page hard to read. The more contrast that exists in the image, the harder the page is to read, regardless of the colors you choose for the text and links. For the best pages, use a very plain background image with very low contrast and select colors for the text that contrast enough with the background to stand out.
2.	Or Select a Background Color Click the color button next to the Background option in the Use Custom Colors section of the Page Colors and Background dialog box. From the color table that appears, select a background color for the page. If the color you select for your active links is too close to the color you select for the page background (if both are shades of blue, for example), the viewer might have trouble seeing the text against the background of the page. Choose your page background color with care. For this example, in the color table, click the color swatch in the top row, second from the right. The color name at the bottom of the dialog box changes to #ccccff. This hexadecimal code specifies a color with quite a bit of red (the first two cc values), quite a bit of green (the second two cc values), and a lot of blue (the third group of values, ff ). When the values are the same for each color (red, green, and blue), the result is a shade of gray. In this example, you have selected a light gray with a tinge of blue.
3.	Change the Active Link Color Click the Advanced Edit button on the Page Colors and Background dialog box. The Advanced Property Editor dialog box comes up. You might not need to open this dialog box to set attributes until you become more proficient with JavaScript and other advanced techniques.

Right now you should see all the attributevalue pairs assigned to the <body> tag of the page. If you want to add another attribute to the <body> tag, click the Attribute drop-down list and select the attribute. Then click the Value drop-down list and choose from the available values for that attribute.

For example, click on the alink attribute (the active link text attribute) in the table at the top of the dialog box and then click the Value drop-down list. A list of colors comes up. Choose the color you want to use for all the active links on the page. The Advanced Property Editor is a different way to access colors; these named colors work in other places in Composer where you can enter color information.

TIP

Because of the way the color information is written into the file, and the way the file is displayed in Composer, you might not see the correct color for the Active link until you preview the file. For the ease of use, you should set colors with either the regular Page Colors and Background dialog box or the Advanced Property Editor and not both on the same tag.