In creating a site how do i change the side colors?

[aerobics]

I wanted to know in creating a website, how do I change the side panels to make it so there is colors on the sides and bottom I thought it would be background but that made the whole document red. Please advise.Thanks

 

[essellar]

It is background, but you can have more than one background. You would need to set the background of your centre panel(s) to white (or what have you).

 

[ARandomCat]

I would need to see some of the code to know what exactly are you talking about.

I will suppose you are using divs for your setup, if that's the case, then you would need to setup the three column page like this:

<div class="container">
   <div class="column-center">Column center</div>
   <div class="column-left">Column left</div>
   <div class="column-right">Column right</div>
</div>

.column-left{ float: left; width: 33%; }
.column-right{ float: right; width: 33%; }
.column-center{ display: inline-block; width: 33%; }

My advise for you would be using an existent grid system, such as gridism (https://github.com/cobyism/gridism) to me it is the simpler out there.
Or more complex solutions such as Bootstrap (http://getbootstrap.com/css/)

 

[essellar]

That's not a safe assumption - there may be divs underlying everything, but a lot of people use WYSIWYG site generators, CMSs, and the like, where the changes they make are settings in a panel rather than CSS as such. Even with plain old HTML and CSS, though, you don't need to go the the trouble of creating a three-column layout, since something like this will do the trick:

html {font-size: 1em; background-color: red;}
body {max-width: 50rem; margin: 0 auto; background-color: white;}

That constrains the width of the main display area (for readability, let's say) so that if the screen gets wider than a certain value, it stops growing at some point; it keeps the main area horizontally centred with a white background, and adds red to the sides and bottom when there's extra screen space to fill. You can also use box-sizing: border-box and solid left and right borders to ensure that there is always some of the desired background visible no matter what the screen size.