HI everyone! Thanks for tuning in to this week's edition of the HTML Newsletter. This time around, I'm going to show you how to let visitors to your Web site have a little more control over their surroundings -- the look of your page, to be specific. This week we'll talk about enabling users of your site to change the background and text colors on your page. We'll use a little JavaScript for this one, but it's nothing you can't handle.

To begin with, what I'm about to show you is probably not the greatest thing to throw into your page without first considering what kind of page you have in the first place. It's up to you to decide what your visitors are going to appreciate. In some cases, allowing users to choose a background color isn't going to add much to your site overall.

This trick works best on pages with little text -- mostly because readability of text relies so heavily on contrast. Most of the time, when you have a lot of text to present, it's better to just choose a light color for the background, a dark one for the text (or vice-versa), and leave it at that. However, when you let people choose their own colors, you take the chance that they're going to choose colors that make it harder to read your site. This could be bad. On the other hand, depending on your site's content, this might be just the thing to liven up your page. A children's site, for instance, with few words, might be a perfect opportunity to try this out. Either way, getting the code into your page is the easy part.

Another nice thing about this trick is that you get to choose the colors that your visitors will have to pick from. This means you can make sure they wont have the opportunity to give your page a black background with orange text... unless you want them to.

The part of the code that's most useful to us is the following:

document.bgColor = '#006600';

In this case, #006600 is the color we want to choose for the background of the page. So, we'll put this line of JavaScript code inside a link, to let people choose it, or another color:

<a href="#" onclick="document.bgColor = '#006600';">green</a> <a href="#" onclick="document.bgColor = '#003399';">blue</a> <a href="#" onclick="document.bgColor = '#CC0066';">pink</a>

And just like that, you've enabled your visitors to make a rather drastic change to your page. You should use the Hex Codes for whatever colors you want to make available-- check out the HTML archives for my series on Web safe colors to get more information on that.

I also promised that I'd tell you how to let your guests change the text color as well. It's as easy as this--simply replace the "bgColor" in the code with "fgColor" and you'll give them control over the color of your words as well as of your background. Note: the fgColor doesn't always work in Netscape 4. You may want to test this out in your browser before uploading to the Web.