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. Becaus219 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 Photoshop.
Figure 24.6. This tile combines several filters applied to a plain white background.
Figure 24.7. There are no options for background tiles; all you have to do is specify the location of the image file you want to use as a background.

Figure 24.8. The background looks even, and the tiling hardly shows at all.
