Social Marketing Tactics

Web Colors and the Color Safe Pallet: Should I still worry about the number of colors my visitors browse displays?

How your computer, Windows and your browser display colors in text and backgrounds
is not the focus here nor is this a tutorial on how your computer uses them. It is meant as
a reference guide as to what colors you can safely use a webmaster. The following chart at the bottom
of the page displays the 216 non-dithering web site safe color codes.

When you use a color that Windows (or Mac) does not recognize the system dithers the
color, or adds additional pixels to try to make up for the system’s or browser’s shortcomings
or just the fact that due to the users monitor the color setting is at 256 color.
The end result is a color on your page that you did not intend or a background color that washes
out the page or darkens it making your text unreadable.

Your computer uses what is called subtractive and additive color, adding subtracting
and combining red (R) green (G) and blue (B) in a six digit code referred to as RGB for the
three colors involved. RGB uses a letter system to define the colors to be displayed and zeros for
the absence of that color value. Hence FF0000 would call for the color red. 00FF00 would call for
green, 0000FF for blue and FFFFFF would call for all the colors and result in white. 000000 would
be the absence of all colors and produces black.

Now to confuse things lets add the hexidecimal system with values starting at 0, thru 9 and letter
values A thru F. Hexidecimal notation uses 16 characters, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E,
and F. Now back to the non-dithering colors that you will want to us on your web pages. Using the hexidecimal
system and a combination of 00, 33, 66, 99, and 00 plus FF and CC we create the web-safe color palatte.

If you stick to the characters F and C and the numbers 3, 6 and 9 you should be OK. That does not
mean you can’t go outside these codes, it means that if you do, you better test it in all the browers,
resolutions and color rendering capabilities. (256 colors, 16 bit and 24 bit)

In short, both Microsoft and Macintosh, Netscape and Internet Explorer recognize these colors and
displays them truthfully on both platforms.

I know many of you are new to HTML so here’s a quick guide to color codes. First your color codes go
between double parenthesis starting with a pound sign. bgcolor=”#FFFFFF” would call for a black background.
You will find this code in the tag, and in

Many will tell that you no longer need to use the # before your color values as new browsers do not require it,
but old habits die hard. Also if you decide to begin using XHTML of XML you must use double quotes around
all atributes.