You may also want to affect the font of your text to give your page a certain look.  Although it is likely many font names are available on your PC, they may not all be available on the PCs of everyone who views your web site.  For that reason it is advisable to handle fonts one of two ways:

1)  Stick to the default fonts that come installed with Microsoft Windows.  These are Arial, Comic Sans MS, Courier New, Georgia,  Impact, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS and Verdana plus a few others that are not that useful normally.

2) You may also specify a font family for use in your text.  This is the preferred method since it will take into consideration Mac users also.  The syntax for a font family is as follows: <font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">.  This syntax says if Arial is found use that font, if not use Helvetica (a default font for the Mac), if neither is found, pick a font from the font family sans-serif.  Sans-serif refers to fonts without the little curl on characters as Courier New as opposed to fonts that contain the curl like Times New Roman.  The curly fonts are supposed to be easier on the eyes, but under certain combinations of font face, style and size they can appear a bit blurred on some PCs.

When you specify no font face, the browser default is used.  When using the <font> tag you are also specifying an attribute to include with it.  The concept of tags and attributes of tags is very important to HTML.

A font tag using the face attribute would look like this:

<font face="arial,helvetica,sans-sefif">I found the Arial font on this PC</font>

Font color can also be controlled through HTML.  Note the syntax for the following:

 <font color="blue">This text is blue</font>

In the PC world, colors break into three strata.  There is a basic palette that consists of 16 colors, a fuller palette of 256 named colors and the full spectrum of 16,777,216 RGB color combinations that Windows can support.  Whether those colors can all be viewed properly depends on a combination of the viewing PC's video card, its Windows settings and the browser being used. 

To be 100% safe in your color choices, you may restrict yourself to the 16 basic colors or take a chance on making use of some of the other colors in the 256 named color set.  If you feel your site needs it, you can take a chance on the blends available under the full spectrum of 16 million colors.  By being too choosy in your colors though, you run the risk of your page not being as pretty as intended, at least for some viewers.  These color rules are also applicable to other web elements that can take on colors like backgrounds (later), table cells (much later), etc.

Font size can also be controlled through a font tag using the size attribute.  The size attribute contains a number between 1 and 7 where 1 is the smallest size and 7 the largest.  If you specify no font size, 3 is used.

 <font size="5">This is size 5</font>

When more than one font tag attribute is specified, they should be grouped together within one font tag:

<font size = "2" face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" color="green">This is size 2 green arial</font>

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