Vertices as particles? I'm new to blender. I'm trying to build a galaxy for a home page on a website. Was wondering what is the least intensive way to get star like particles for a galaxy that can be used for a website. Right now I have cubes for the particles, but I heard vertices could possibly be used. If so how would I go about using the vertices and coloring them?
You used to be able to render vertices as halos. That only worked with the old Blender Internal renderer which was completely scrapped. I miss the halos. 
Anyways, there is an alternative option called Point Density, I'm not going into this here, because it renders slowly and is not well suited for your situation. 
I suggest you use icospheres, or stick to the cubes if they looked good enough.