Including extras:
e-mail links, color, &
backgrounds
To add some extra functionality or spice to your page, you might think about including a few more features. Curious about the number of times your page is accessed? Include a counter. Would you like to make it easy for someone to comment on your page via e-mail? Include an e-mail link. Want to give your page a little personality? Spruce it up with color or a background texture.
I. Fostering feedback
You can encourage readers to comment about your page, by creating a link that opens a window where they can type and send you an e-mail message. To create the e-mail link, open your html file and move the cursor to the place in the file where you would like the link to appear on the page. Then, type the following code:
<A href="mailto:loginID@system-name"> Text that will appear as the link</A>
where loginID@system-name is your email address. For example, if your loginID is jdoe and your account is on unix.temple.edu, you would type:
<A href="mailto:jdoe@nimbus.ocis.temple.edu ">Send e-mail</A>
II. Working with color
If you feel that your background or text is a bit boring, you can spice up the page with a little color. You can add color to your text or background by including the color word or hexadecimal code in your html file. To display text in color, type the following HTML tag after the <BODY> tag:
<body text="color">
where,
color is a name of a color, such as red, or the hexadecimal code for a color, such as FFFBEC.
To display the background in color, type the following HTML tag after the <BODY> tag:
<body bgcolor="color">
where,
color is the name of a color, such as blue, or the hexadecimal code for a color, such as FFFBEC.
When using color names, your choices include: black, olive, teal, red, blue, maroon, navy, gray, lime, fuchsia, white, green purple, silver, yellow, and aqua, brown, pink, wheat, turquoise, magenta, cyan, and aquamarine. For some colors, you can precede the color name with the word light or dark, such a lightgreen and darkgreen.
To use a color other than these, you need to specify its code. To find out the code for a particular color, go to the following web site: www.pagetutor.com/pagetutor/makapage/picker
This web site enables you to quickly try out different color schemes. On the left side of the page, click on one of the colors on the grid. Then select the item with which you want to experiment (background, text, link, visited link, or active link).
The item that you selected now becomes that color. When you find a color that you like, note the three hexadecimal values on the left of the screen. Combining the value for the red component, followed by the green component, followed by the blue component forms the code that uniquely the color.
Once you have the code, simply include it in the same space as the color word as shown here:
<body bgcolor="ACFFA2">
or
<body text="B7E4FE">
III. Going beyond basic backgrounds
The background for your page is not limited just to color. You can display graphics or various textures or designs. The graphic or design must be saved in as a GIF or JPEG file and referenced right after the <BODY> tag with the following tag:
<BODY BACKGROUND="filenname">
For example, if the file is called scene.gif, you would type:
<BODY BACKGROUND="scene.gif">
The background will then appear as one large graphic or as a small graphic duplicated many times to fill the page.
Back to Creating a Web Page at Temple
Updated 2/08/07
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