Background colors are specified very similar to the way link colors are. Right inside the opening <body> tag you simply tell the browser what color to display in the background by typing the following:
<body bgcolor="red"> Again, you may use hex values for this tag also.
And you don't have to create a new <body> tag to specify the background color. You can include it within the same tag that lists the link color. So in other words, a web page with green links, orange visited links, purple active links and a red background would be indicated by:
<body bgcolor="red" link="green" vlink="orange" alink="purple">
Lesson # 6 : HTML Tutorial - Hyperlinks