To specify the color, you must know the color's hexidecimal RGB (red,
green, blue) value. If you can find the color's RGB number, you can
convert it to hexidecimal using a web-based converter at:
http://www.novalink.com/pei/hex/hex.html.
There is also a Web page of popular color numbers at:
http://www.infi.net/wwwimages/colorindex.html
In this example, the color 00FFFF (no red, maximum green and blue) is light blue. You must specify the color value in the body tag like this:
<body bgcolor="#OOFFFF">
See this page with the OOFFFF color in the
background.
The tag for specifying a background uses the background= attribute with the path or URL to the image. If you create your own image and have it in the directory with the html file, you can just specify the image name.
<body background="metal.gif"> or <body background= "http://www2.ncsu.edu/ncsu/cc/edu/html_trng/advclass/metal.gif">See this page with the metal background image
If you specify a background color as well as an image, the image will usually take precedence although your page may flash the background color when it first loads.