You can set the style of an HTML element in three ways: inline, internal and external. We will talk much more about internal and external when we learn about CSS (which is the preferred way to do styles), but at times using inline styles can be helpful (and what you learn here can be applied to internal and external styling).
An inline style is an attribute that is added to an HTML tag. The attribute is comprised of a property and a value.
Here's an example of making a paragraph have a background color. This first paragraph does not have the style applied to it, the second one does.
Notice the syntax of the property:value pair. It starts with style= then quotation marks, then the property:value pair separated with a :.
<p style="background-color:red">
Some common properties to use with inline style include:
background-color for background color
color for text colors (name, rgb, or hex)
font-family for text fonts (web-safe fonts)
font-size for text sizes (in pixels or percent)
text-align for text alignment (left, right, center, justify)