9.1. Colors

When designing a page, you need to plan it out before you start. That's generally true in any case, but with colors, it's even more so. If you're going to make all hyperlinks yellow, will they clash with the background color in any part of your document? If you use too many colors, will it overwhelm the user? (Hint: yes.) If you change the default hyperlink colors, will users still be able to figure out where your links are? (For example, if you make both regular text and hyperlink text the same color, it's much harder to spot links—in fact, almost impossible if the links aren't underlined.)

Despite the added planning, the ability to change the colors of elements is something almost every author will want to use, probably quite often. Used properly, colors can really strengthen the presentation of a document. As an example, let's say you have a design where all h1 elements should be green, most h2 elements should be blue, and all hyperlinks should be dark red. In some cases, however, you want h2 elements to be dark blue because they're associated with different types of information. The simplest way to handle this is to assign a class to each h2 that should be dark blue and declare the following: