Question: I can't seem to change the background color of a div I have in my HTML, here is what I have so far:

```html
<div class="footer">
  <div class="left-footer">
  </div>
  <div class="center-footer">
  </div>
  <div class="right-footer">
  </div>
</div>

```

```css
.footer {
  color: #FF0000;
  width: 100%;
}

```

Answer: 
You should be using `background` (shorthand) or `background-color` to change the background color.

Something like this would:

```
.footer {
    background-color: #fff;
}

```

You'll also need to add either something to the div to give it height, or declare at height for the div in CSS like so:

```
.footer {
    background-color: #fff;
    width: 100%;
    height: 30px;
}

```
Based on your CSS you are using the incorrect property to set the background color, use `background-color` instead of `color`. `color` is used for setting the color of you text.

**Note** Based on some comments to answers it seems that you have tested `background-color` on your sample markup, which has no content and therefore the DIVs will have no height and you will not see the background color. Please add content to the DIVs or give them a specified height so you can see `background-color` working.

```css
.footer {
    background-color: red;
}

```

Another possibility (based on unseen code and assumed code) is that the child DIVs of `.footer` are all floated, causing the `.footer` DIV to collapse and hide the background color. To fix this you would need to apply a [clearfix](http://nicolasgallagher.com/micro-clearfix-hack/) to the `.footer` DIV.