You may see colors set like this:

background-color: BLUE;

or you may see them set like this:

background-color: #0000FF;

There are two different ways to specify a color in your palette.

You can use standard color names like RED, BLUE, GREEN, YELLOW, DARKGREEN, etc. Most common colors should work. If you are not sure, try one out and see what happens.

For more advanced colors or shades, you need to use the second format.

The easiest way to do this is to go to a site like this:

HTML Color Selector

Just hover over the color you want and copy down the "#" code in the box at the bottom. It is ok to use upper or lowercase letters when you set the color... they both work. Don't forget to put the ; at the end when entering it in your palette.

To make your first change, try going to the Palette Editor and Editing your work palette. Find the line near the top that says:

background-color: WHITE;

and change it to:

background-color: #CCFFCC;

Which is a light blue-green color that I got from that color selector website above.

Save your changes and then "View Work Palette". The background of your blog page should now be light blue-green!

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While not necessary if you use the above link, If you want to understand what these numbers mean, read on...

It may look complicated at first but it is really not.

Advanced colors are like this:

#(RED)(GREEN)(BLUE);

Where you specify the amount of red, green and blue in the color -- just like you did in grade school. Each one is a "hexidecimal" number that ranges from 00 to FF. FF is the biggest hexidecimal number and 00 is the smallest.

Remember Yellow and Blue make Green? Well you can't specify Yellow here -- but Red and Green make Yellow.

You can specify the color yellow by saying YELLOW or #FFFF00;

Here are some more examples:

RED = #FF0000;
GREEN = #00FF00;
BLUE = #0000FF;
BLACK = #000000;
WHITE = #FFFFFF;

DARKRED = #770000;

When editing a palette, you will see some lines like this:

/*
This is the font color for the blog post
*/

or like this...

/* This is the font color for the blog post */

These are "comment" lines which are there to help you know which items you can change and what they do.

Everything between /* and */ is a comment and does not affect your blog.

You can even add your own comments if you like. This will help you keep track of what you changed. Also, if you want to try something out, you can duplicate a line and make a change. For example, if there is a line to change a color like:

background-color: WHITE;

and you want to try out changing it to black, but don't want to forget how to set it to white, you can do this:

/*
background-color: WHITE;
*/
background-color: BLACK;

The first line changing the background to white will not work, since it is treated as a comment. If you decide you don't like the black, you can remove that line and remove the comments.

If you have a Blogstream blog, you can customize the color and font settings for your entire page. We refer to this as editing your blogs "Palette" (rather than a "Template" which would refer to the actual design of the blog page, such as where boxes and text actually appear).

Creating a custom palette is an advanced feature. It uses a simple language called "CSS" (Cascading Style Sheets). This is how most modern websites design their color scheme.

You do not have to be a web designer to make simple changes to your palette. It may seem a little confusing at first, but I suggest trying small changes at a time to see what happens. Try changing the color of one item for example and seeing what happens. Over time you can move on to more advanced changes.

You can edit your blogs Palette by going to "My Account" and clicking on the Palette link next to your blog.

There are two areas in your blog Palette. The "Live" area, which is what visitors see when they come to your blog page... and the "Work" area which is where you can play around and try different colors, font sizes, etc. before making them live.

The first thing you want to do is go to the Palette page and click on "Reset Work Palette to Default". This will make a copy of your current live blog palette and put it into your work area for editing.

Now click on "Edit Work Palette" to begin editing.