dreamweaver help forum - Text colour

Hi Simon,

It's certainly not a stupid question. Link colours can be tricky. I'll try to give you as much information as I can so that you understand how they work.

Firstly, understand that links are quite different in that they have four 'selector states'. And you can have different styles for each selector state.

The states are:
link (a normal link)
visited (a link that the visitor has been to before)
active (the currently selected or clicked link)
hover (when mouse cursor is hovered over the link)

To avoid confusion and people getting lost, it's important for people browsing the web to know where they have been before. Therefore, usability standards say that a visited link should be a different colour to that of a non-visited link. Usability standards also say that the colour of the 'visited' state should be 'washed out', or a more dull colour.

So since web browsers came into existence, blue has been the standard 'link' state, and purple has been the standard 'visited' state.

The web browser controls these colours if you don't specify them in your cascading style sheet (CSS). To set up styles for links, because links use the anchor tag (A), you'll need the tag, followed by a colon, followed by the state.

So typical CSS code would look like this:
a:link {color: blue; text-decoration: underline;}
a:visited {color: green; text-decoration: underline;}
a:active {color: red; text-decoration: underline;}
a:hover {color: blue; text-decoration: none;}

The above translates to: your page has blue underlined links, and when the mouse hovers over the underline disappears. When the link is clicked it will turn red. When you return to the same page later, the link will be green and underlined.

For your page, you may have a style set up for tag 'a', but not the individual states, which is where the browser's default colours are taking over for your 'visited' colour.

The old way to set these colours is in the body tag. In Dreamweaver you go to Modify -> Page Properties. But I would strongly recommend the CSS method, as this enables you to be more flexible with your colours throughout your site.

Hope this helps. Let me know how you get on.

Regards, Rich