When planning color combinations for your web site, you'll be faced with a basic design issue. Should you use dark text on a light background or light text on a dark background?

The answer lies in understanding the purpose of your site and the kind of audience you expect. It's a known fact that black text on a light yellow / white background (similar to this web page) provides the best viewing conditions. Using light text on a dark background, reduces the readability by 10% (or more).
If your site offers a lot of content, I'd recommend going in for dark text on a light background. In contrast to this is light text on a dark background that creates a sense of mystery and intrigue. For such pages, the text is kept to a minimal amount with graphics providing the emphasis.

Use Browser Safe Colors

Because browsers appear on almost any known Operating System there is a problem with displaying the proper colors. Not all systems can handle 16,8 million colors (ie. 24 bit) for example. That's why there is a predefined palette of 196 colors, called the Browser Safe Color Palette. To make sure the color of your choice appears as the same color on all computers.

Colors can be respresented in terms like "blue" and "red" and "cyan", but also in red-green-blue pairs. These values are represented in hex-values. For example #000000 will produce Black and #FF0000 will produce red. The pairs are create by the hex values of red, green and blue as such: #RRGGBB.

You use these values for example (including the "#"-character!) for defining the background color, font color, table color, etc.

In the table below you will see these color-codes and their appearance.

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