Anybody know how I can get photoshop to use websafe colours? And how I can draw a line with a brush without the edges of it going all faded?

Maybe PhotoShop has a web safe colour palette you can switch to. If not, it should be possible to type in the web safe colour values you want to use and save them in a colour palette, additional to the default set of colours. A web safe colour palette with the values showing can be found here:

http://www.lynda.com/value.html

Somtimes it helps to have a colour sampler (picker) independent of any Paint program to find the values of colours. A good free one can be found here.

http://eyedropper.inetia.com/ (click on the English version icon, right of page).

It ends up being an icon next to the clock. Turn it on and off by clicking on it. When operational, just hover the magnifier over any colour on the Internet, Desktop, photo etc and the RGB, hex and CMYK values will be shown.

This related article is also worth taking note of:

http://webmonkey.wired.com/webmonkey/00/37/index2a.html

Too be honest, I've never used "web safe colors". Well, I may have used them, but I've never limited myself to them. I choose a color I like and use the hex value for it. Sometimes I play around with the html named values, and occasionally I manually input the 51, 102, etc. values to see if I can come up with something I like, but, in recent years, anyway, I've usually ended up just picking a color, converting it to hex and calling it good. I do a lot of cross-browser, OS and resolution investigation before I put a site online, but I've never encountered problems yet.

Frankly, as that article says, I don't think too many people are still using 8-bit color on their systems, and as that article suggests, there's no real way to design a pleasing website that is REALLY websafe by today's standards. Rather than pleasing all of the people all of the time, I go for pleasing ME all of the time and pleaing MOST of the people MOST of the time.

I know people don't use really use then any more and thats why im so peeved at having to use them. Stupid out of date course!

I've used a web safe colour for the title bars on our site. I thought I might as well. However, I too think it isn't all that important to use them. Photos contain far more than 216 colours. The shades in them may well vary a bit when viewed with different browsers or different computer colour settings but they still look OK.

If a non-websafe shade of blue is chosen for a page's construction, perhaps that shade may differ a little depending on the browser used or computer settings. I don't think visitors to the site would be very concerned about that.

I suppose course work often seems to have no practical purpose. It does makes you find out how to do something though and maybe that's the point of it. Perhaps the interesting parts will come after all that.