Code:
<style>
.input { BACKGROUND-COLOR: transparent;
COLOR: #4D0000;}
</style>
This would go in the <head> and the </head>tag in your code.
After that, the code you need is this:
Code:
<textarea name="message" rows="10" cols="$textareacols" wrap="virtual" tabindex="1" style="input">
Hope this works. You can fins sites out there with CSS tutorials. you should learn them so that you can mess around with more of the features of your website. Like changing the colors of your scrollbars, making fast changes to text without defining them within the tags. It's kind of like defining variables.