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.
Now, all you have to do is to be sure that when you upload your page to the Web, the background image is where you said it would be. Figure 24.8 shows the tiled background with some type placed over it.
Figure 24.8. The background looks even, and the tiling hardly shows at all.
Here's a trick for placing a stripe down one side of your page. Make a single tile that's a little wider than the width of the screen by as few pixels high as needed. Place your color and/or texture on its left side, and then save it as a GIF or JPEG. The file will probably look something like