Basic Guide For Writing Web Pages -- Introduction / Table Of Contents / Previous Page / Next Page

Basic Web Page Writing Step 19
Background Graphics

In step 17 your saw how to change the background color of your page and in 18, how to change the colors of parts of your text. You have probably seen a background scene or graphic on some of the pages you have visited on the web. If not, you should be seeing one now. If the background image does not appear, be sure you have the auto load image option on in you browser. The one used on this page is a graphic image called PARCH.GIF

This step will show you how to place a graphic image as the background to your page. The option you will use is the BACKGROUND="..." option placed inside the BODY start tag just like you did for BGCOLOR=#.... in step 17.

Adding A Background Graphic

Most newer browsers can load an image and use it as the background for you page. If you use a background graphic be sure that the text can be read easily and remember that a background graphic will add to the time it takes to load in the page.

The BACKGROUND graphic can be a texture of some kind, or an image of some object, but it should not contain lots of different colors and it should be easy to read text that is place over the top of it.

The image used is only a small part of an image. A browser will "tile" the image and repeat it just as MS Windows does for it's wallpaper backgrounds. The browser will automatically till the image until it fills the page.

The format for placing the BACKGROUND option into your page is:

<BODY BACKGROUND="PARCH.GIF">

NOTE: FILE NAMES SHOULD BE LOWER CASE.
       UPPER CASE IS USED HERE ONLY FOR EASE OF VIEWING.
That is how this page was formatted to display the graphic image. If you want to download this image it is available here as----PARCH.GIF for downloading

Or try one of these:

  1. ----RAINDROP.GIF for downloading
  2. ----BRICK.GIF for downloading
  3. ----PLASTER.GIF for downloading
  4. ----PAPER.GIF for downloading
For additional background graphics check out Heikki's Background Image Gallery. You'll find a number of real nice backgrounds there.

Try placing background images in you page, but remember not to over do it. You may want to use them on a few of your links to give the user something different to look at. Also be sure not to use text colors and link colors that would be difficult to see on the background image you use. Remember to check them out carefully before you upload them to your server.

In step 20 you will see how to add tables to your page to create columns and rows of information.

STEP 20 -- Creating Tables

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created by Larry Curreri,

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last modified: January 14, 2002

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