Specifying a Background Color

In Dreamweaver, you can easily change the background color of a page using a palette like the one you used in Lesson 3 when you defined link colors. In this exercise, you'll access the color palette from the Page Properties dialog box to change the background color for the index.html document.

1.	Open index.html from the Lesson_04_CSS folder. Choose Modify > Page Properties and select Appearance from the Category list. Tip You can use the keyboard commands Cmd+J (Macintosh) or Ctrl+J (Windows) to open the Page Properties dialog box. In the Appearance screen of the Page Properties dialog box, you'll see that no defaults have been defined for this page, even though white is the default background color for the Document window in Dreamweaver. If you do not define a background color, the page will be displayed using the browser default (usually white) when a visitor views the page. Because the browser default can vary from browser to browser, it is recommended that you always define the background color of the page.
2.	Click the color box for the Background Color option. Click the pale yellow swatch that displays the hexadecimal code #FFFFCC. The pale yellow color #FFFFCC is now selected as the background color for your page. You can also type the hexadecimal code directly into the text field next to the color box to change the color.
3.	Click Apply to view the new background color without closing the Page Properties dialog box.

The background color of your page is now the light yellow color that you selected in the Page Properties dialog box.

Leave the Page Properties dialog box open for the next exercise.