Hi Louis, adding a background image/color to the body tag is a nice easy option with CSS, like the one I used for the site in my sig (which is made up of a background image in the body and then the rest chopped up in my header containers).

body{
font: 100% arial,sans-serif;
text-align:center;
background-color:#8ab343;
background-image:url(/Graphics/SiteGeneral/SiteBG.jpg);
background-repeat:no-repeat;
background-position:center top;
}

Then you can add background images to other container divs to make up really elaborate backgrounds. (have to admit I get a little carried away sometimes)

Another good tip is saving your image as a .gif file if it's made up of solid colors rather than something like a photo where theres lots of shading, I've used really large background gifs at around 10kb that if I'd have saved them as jpg would have been 80kb.

You'll never look back once you start using CSS

Thanks Aaron but I meant the white background behind content/text.

For the whole site MAIN background I usually just assign a #color.

Louis

Sorry Louis, I'm not with it today.

You can use the same principle for anything in your HTML with CSS not just the body so you can just add an id to the table or container div and use it to add a background the same way.

But if you want just a couple of words to have say a yellow background then you need to add a span to those words so in your HTML you have something like:

<span class="yellowbg">Not your usual bike review</span>

and in your CSS you declare it like this:

.yellowbg{
background-color:#ffff00;
}

Hope that helps

Hey Aaron I took a look at your site and I see you also use images as content backgrounds "Footer960.jpg".

My main concern is loading times but it seems most choose an image over just assigning a colour to the background which I would have thought loaded quicker?

I'm currently trying to learn CSS as it's so more advance than html.

Thank you,
Louis

If it was just a solid color then I'd definately assign a color to the div or whatever I was using rather than use an image.

If you're learning CSS and you've got a little bit of HTML under your belt I'd highly recommend the following two books:
Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook (Dan Cederholm)
CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions (Andy Budd, Cameron Moll and Simon Collison)

I stopped and started with CSS years back but once I'd read the 'Web Standards Solutions' book I felt very comfortable using CSS, it's very easy to follow too.

Louis:

Try this link for learning CSS: CSS Background Properties

The background repeat option with CSS really helps to cut down on load times. Make your original image as small as possible and you can repeat it as much as you want.

This can work for page backgrounds, or page element backgrounds. Works the same way for both.

Linda

Hi Linda,

would you reccomend using an image, div or table for white content/text backgrounds?

Thanks