Web safe colours

However, there is nothing you can do about the fact that different monitors display the same colour differently. What you can do is minimise the ghastly impacts that can occur.

The first rule is amazingly simple but constantly abused. Avoid light coloured text on dark coloured backgrounds. There are a few exceptions (eg. bold white text on a black background) but, basically this is the area where most hassles occur.

The other is to use colours known to 'behave' or 'vibrate' (if that makes sense) on certain monitors (especially older ones). Old monitors are generally dying out and being replaced by newer more consistent ones but there are still significant variations (particularly in brightness and contrast).

Dreamweaver has a built in colour picker but it doesn't work well when you're using style sheets. This is the snaziest colour picker I've come across in my travels. It's laid out in such a way as to make it obvious (to me anyway) how changing each of the three pairs of hexadecimal colour representations impacts a colour.

Many find the blobby 'wheel' type representation more helpful. A good example of this can be found on the official this w3.org CSS web site.

I find both these representations useful depending on what I'm looking for (the latter is useful for viewing how one colour looks along side another).