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Preparing Backgrounds

I admit that I have mixed feelings about backgrounds on web pages. These can really add personality to a website, but they also can make reading the text of your site difficult and frustrating. To quote web designer David Siegel, “Gift-wrap makes poor stationery.”

That said, however, if you use backgrounds with discretion, they can add to a site's presence and look. Because HTML includes the capability to tile any image as a background, your background file can be quite small. You just have to make sure that it doesn't have obvious edges or pictures that end abruptly, unless that's what you want. In Figure 24.6, I've created a tile for a web page background, and I'm saving it as a GIF using the Save For Web dialog box in ...