How to Change the Background Color With CSS

CSS or Cascading Style Sheets is a powerful technology that enables web designers to dictate the visual aesthetics of their websites. With CSS, you can change a website’s background color to any of your preferred colors, including gradients and patterns. These changes can be made on specific pages, sections, or the whole site.
To change the background color of a website, you need first to understand how CSS works. CSS is a language used to style HTML documents, and it consists of three primary parts: the selector, the property, and the value. The selector is the HTML tag, class, or ID that you want to style. The property is the type of style you want to apply, such as color, size, margin, padding, or background. The value is the specific setting, such as red, 20px, -10%, or repeating-linear-gradient().
Changing the background color of a website involves selecting the HTML body element and applying the background-color property with the value of your preferred color. Here’s how you can do it:
1. Open your text editor or IDE and create a new CSS document.
2. Add the following code to select the body element and apply a background color:
body {
background-color: #f2f2f2;
}
In this example, we’ve used the hex color code #f2f2f2, which represents a light gray color. You can also use other color formats, such as RGB, RGBA, HSL, or HSLA.
3. Save your CSS file and link it to your HTML file by adding the following code inside the head section:
Make sure to replace “your-stylesheet.css” with the actual name of your CSS file.
4. Open your HTML file in your web browser or a web development tool like Chrome DevTools or Firefox Developer Tools. You should see the background color of your website changed to the color you specified in your CSS file.
Some other tips to customize your website’s background color with CSS include using gradients, patterns, or images. For example, you can create a linear gradient with two or more colors using the following code:
body {
background: linear-gradient(to bottom, #ff9900, #cc0000);
}
This code creates a gradient that starts from orange and ends with red from top to bottom.
Another way to add a background image is by using the background-image property with a URL value that points to the location of your image file.
body {
background-image: url(“your-image-file.jpg”);
}
You can also adjust the background image’s position, size, repeat, and other settings using other CSS properties.