I found a good article on dzone today titled Why Programmers Suck at CSS Design. The title is actually misleading, rather than focus on the why, it will actually help you create some better looking pages.

I've often wanted to write a blog entry about the same topic.

This screen shot is taken from a Virtuozzo Power Panel, which despite my complaints here, has some nice features for managing a VPS.

As you can see they use a light shade of red for the red zone, and then red for the black zone.

I just found this Color Contrast Checker web site on del.ic.ious. You just give it your foreground (text) color and background color, and it will tell you if there is enough color contrast "when viewed by someone having color deficits or when viewed on a black and white screen" (W3C).