But every now and then, there is a website with a photo or a drawing or a pattern background. This tutorial will show you not just how to place a background on your website, but five clever ticks to spice up background without resorting to gaudiness.

The basic html code to place a background on your web page is very simple:

To place a background in a table, perhaps set against a solid color page background, here is basic html code:

The image file called image.jpg now becomes your background. A typical image would show up "tiled". In other words, it repeats itself horizontally and vertically to fill screen. This usually does not look very professional, so here are five tricks to clean it up and spice it up.

1. Use "strip" graphics. Strip graphics are simply very long images that stretch across screen. When they repeat, they repeat one below other. To see this in action, view my page at http://www.thehappyguy.com/SEO.html . The yellow strip along right side looks like it is part of top banner image. But it is a 650 by 20 strip image, mostly white, with a touch of yellow along left side. This works well with patterns that vary only from left to right

2. Hold background in place. When a visitor scrolls down, text rolls over image. I used this trick at my personal website: http://www.leonhardtonline.com (Please forgive mess – I never seem to find time to clean it up.) The html code to do this is:

This works for patterns, but it works best for photos or drawings, such as a faded image of your company logo or a faded scenery shot or a faded photo of people interacting. (Remember that background should not stand out at expense of foreground text and images, which is why you want faded images.)

Building Good Websites Written by Jesse S. Somer Websites, there’s literally billions of them out there in cyber-space. How many of them do you go to and just think this is boring, bland, or hard to use? It seems like too many to mention. So what makes a good website? I reckon it’s about interaction. You’ve got to make visitor interested. You’ve got to grab their attention. Many sites use plenty of bright and shiny gimmicks to attract you, but once you make it through to content of site it’s just not worthy. A good site uses easy navigation, relevant content, and interactive media like comments and message boards. If you’re fortunate, whoever builds your site may even have a few tricks up their sleeves to make it really fun with sound, video, and other interactive fun stuff. Do you want people to come to your site and then tell their friend and family about it? Do you want to have huge amounts of visitors? Do you want to succeed in making your dreams come to fruition on Web? Make your website exciting! It might be easier said than done, but there are people around whose job it is to construct and design sites for a living. If you can afford it, go for best. How great is it when you come across a site that has some special feature that you’ve never seen elsewhere? Isn’t it great when you find a site that relates to one of your interests that is simple and easy to get to information you want? If you want to have people to come back again and again, you’ve got to keep updating content to keep it fresh and interesting. Have a way for people to communicate with yourself and others who are into same things. E.G. Forums, message boards and comments. The aim is to catch ‘viewer’s’ interest.

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