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Browser-Safe Colors
Computers running in 256 color mode maintain a 216 color "browser-safe" color palette. Requested colors are "snapped" to the nearest browser-safe color. This palette is optimized for cross-platform use. Only using colors in this palette will ensure your pages look the same on all browsers.
Browser-safe colors have only R, G, and B values as follows:
Hexadecimal 00 33 66 99 CC FF
Decimal 0 51 102 153 204 255
Percentage 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
For example, the following colors are browser-safe: #0033FF, #33CC66, #FFFFFF
The Browser-Safe Palette should not be used to remap color photographs. It is better to use an adaptive palette (with no dithering, if possible), and let the end-browser do any additional dithering. The Browser-Safe Palette is useful whenever specifying colors in HTML or for flat-color illustrations, logos with flat-color, and areas in any image that have a lot of a single color.
It is usually best to only use the 216 browser-safe colors when designing web pages. However, that does not mean you are limited to only 216 colors! By manually dithering two or more browser-safe colors together you can create millions of colors. See www.colormix.com for more information.
Images for Web pages
Most computer monitors can only display 72 pixels per inch. In addition, many computers can only display 256 colors. When creating images for Web sites, be sure to convert the images to 72 dpi and 256 colors. This will greatly reduce the file size of the image, allowing it to download much faster.
Easy Graphic Headlines
You can use Microsoft's WordArt to quickly create interesting headline graphics for your webpages. Simply create the headline in WordArt, apply the look you want, then export as a .gif file.
Background Colors
Beware the differences between the way Netscape browsers and Internet Explorer display a web page. By default, Navigator & Communicator use a gray background, but IE uses a white background. To ensure your pages look the same in both browsers, specify the background color in the
tag. For example, to specify a white background, simply use .Save Web Pages
Use Internet Explorer 5.x to capture complete web pages or just the HTML. Prior to IE 5, both Navigator and IE would save just the HTML of a web page if you used the "save as" feature. However, by default, IE now saves a standalone web page complete with graphics when you choose "save as". As IE saves the files, it changes graphic links in the html so the graphics may be referenced from a local drive. If you want an unmodified version of the page, make sure to choose the "web page, HTML only" option when you save a page.
Figure 1
Icons for Favorites
You can make your site stand out in Internet Explorer's Favorites list by adding an icon file to your Web site. This only works with IE 5 and above, but it's an easy way to make your bookmark more obvious.
Figure 2
To make this work, you will create an icon file called "favicon.ico". This is a 16-pixel square icon file. To be certain it displays correctly, use no more than 16 Windows colors. You can use a dedicated Windows icon program, or use a converter to use an existing graphic by converting it to the 16x16 pixel icon. Once the icon is created, upload it to each directory of your Web site so IE can find it regardless of which page the viewer bookmarks. You can try an on-line icon creator, or download a trial version of icon editing software at www.favicon.com. This site also lists additional information about favicon.ico.
Redirect with Refresh
Redirect viewers with meta refresh pages. Sometimes you may want a user to go to a different page without changing the URL. For instance, if you used to have a page at www.mysite.com/products/new.htm that your customers have bookmarked, but now want to have the news page at www.mysite.com/news/index.htm you can set up a simple meta refresh page to point them to the new page.
To do this, create a basic web page then add the following information in the section:
Now save this file with the same name as the page that you want people redirected from.
The number after "content=" is the number of seconds the browser will wait before requesting the new page. If you want to explain to the viewer that they will be redirected, you should set this high enough for your message to be read. If you simply want the user to be automatically redirected, you should set this value to 0.
The url is where they will be redirected after the delay has expired. Make sure the delay and url are within a single set of quotes, separated by a semicolon.
