Office Live's web site themes and color schemes make your life a lot easier. Agreed, they are quite restrictive in some ways but for people who don't know anything about web site design or HTML, they are godsent.
But if you have even a tiny bit of aesthetic sense, you'll want to match the colors in backgrounds and images on your pages with those in the color scheme you have chosen. There's just one tiny little problem. Every color scheme in Office Live has seven colors, but you don't know which seven. You don't know their codes, in other words, so you can't match your backgrounds and images with them.
Figure 1. The PIXIE window
There's a great little utility out there, called PIXIE that solves the problem. PIXIE is free, of course, and it doesn't have annoying pop-ups or advertisements included gratis. Nor do you have to lie about your past on lengthy registration forms by cooking up a maiden name for your mother or name the teacher you hated with your gut as your all-time favorite teacher.
It's a great little utility that I've used for a long time. And for the benefit of doubting Thomases out there, I don't know its developer and I don't get paid to recommend it.
Figure 2. PIXIE at work on my web site
You can download it at http://www.nattyware.com/pixie.html.
Download and intall PIXIE on your computer. When you run it, it pops up a little window, like the one in Figure 1, that displays the color of a pixel on the screen that the cursor points to. Alongside it, it displays the color's code in several formats. The one you're interested in is the HTML color code. The window always stays on top, so you don't have to fish for it after clicking around in Site Designer.
Figure 2 shows my Office Live web page in Site Designer and you can see the HTML color code in the scheme I've chosen.
You can use PIXIE to find the color code of just about any pixel on your screen.