More Creative Use of Backgrounds

Many questions have been asked on the Serif forum about page backgrounds and how they can be effectively deployed on a web-site. From a pure design viewpoint, backgrounds can help you create a much stronger and brighter image, and certainly helps to overcome the problem of what to do with all that extra space that wide-screen displays present us with.

In this short tutorial, we show you how to integrate a background image that takes care of the space on each side of the page, but still allows you to show a clearly defined web-page. Furthermore, the design can become an integral part of your page design, rather than just stuck on each side of your web-pages.

In the example here, we’ve chosen quite a vivid background to better illustrate what we mean. However, the same technique works equally well with more subtle background designs.

Step One

Get yourself a background image - the type that is usually used for tiling a background. The one we’ve used is shown below:

This tile is 160 px wide,you may find one that’s a different size, depending upon the complexity of the design and its repeating frequency. Whatever design you use, just keep a note of the width, as you will need this information for the next step.

When you have your tile just import it into webPlus on a blank page.

Tip. We’re using this design to help us create a banner area so we need it to be quite deep. If this is the case in your design, you can simply copy and paste the graphic, and align one below the other. Because these tiles are repeating designs, they will line up seamlessly.

 

 

Move on to Step 2