Making a Background - How to change page colours
Page properties dialog box
Background and text colours
Page properties dialog box
The appearance of your Web page is controlled by the Page Properties dialog box in Microsoft FrontPage Express. This dialog box is 'tabbed', and it is the background tab we need. To bring this dialog box up, just select File | Page Properties from the File menu. You should see something like this
<Click on thumbnail to see a larger version>
Background and text colours
First, we change the 'ink and paper' colours. The background colour controls the colour of the paper, and the text colour controls the colour of the ink, look on the left hand side of the dialog box.
- Click over the drop down list for Background or Text, you will see a sample of some standard colours.
- Selecting the 'custom' colour will bring up the Windows colourpicker, and allow you to 'mix' your own colour.
Resist the temptation to mix subtle shades, especially if you have a 24 bit (millions of colours) display. There is no guarantee that your readers will see the same colours on their computers.
Activity: 'Play' with various combinations of background and text colour. Which colours do you think are easiest to read?
Activity: Look at the colour test page which contains one background colour and a range of text colours. Which text colour gives best contrast?
Light text on dark backgrounds
Light coloured text on dark backgrounds can look attractive, but beware if your readers are likely to want to print the page on a monochrome printer. Netscape Communicator and MS Internet Explorer will both ignore the dark background colour, leaving light grey or white text on white paper.......
Overriding colour choices
Users with impaired vision may find strongly coloured pages difficult to read, and users may want to print pages with dark backgrounds and light text on monochrome printers. Browsers can be set to override the default colours in your page, and use their own colour defaults instead. To do this in MS Internet Explorer 4 , you just
- Select View | Internet Options from the View menu item. For IE5 Tools | Internet Options from the Tools menu item
- In the Internet Options dialog box which appears, select the General tab
- Click the Accessibility button in the bottom right hand corner of this dialog box
- You should see a dialog box like this:
Just check the Ignore Colours specified on Web pages option to over-ride a garish colour choice. Please remember to reverse this setting after your session if you use a networked computer!
