The wallpaper you choose for your computer's desktop and the web page background you'd like to add to your web site have at least one thing in common: they're both great ways to add a background image, texture or pattern to your website. Regardless of whether you use a PC or a Mac, adding or changing your desktop's wallpaper is a simple point-and-click exercise. But adding a background to a web site requires a little more than basic point-and-click skills. Luckily, changing a web page's basic white background into something more appealing doesn't have to qualify as rocket science.
The most demanding of these is to create your own backgrounds. To do this, you'll need to have a basic knowledge of some kind of graphic design software, so you can create the good-looking GIF or JPEG images your backgrounds will need. Although you don't need an expensive program like Photoshop, if you're a quick study you can download a free 30-day trial copy of Photoshop from Adobe and dive right into the process of creating your own web page backgrounds. Remember, too, that you'll also need a basic understanding of HTML to add the HTML tags to your website that will make your background images appear. If you don't want to go the graphic design route, an alternative is to find web page backgrounds on - where else? - the Web itself. Web masters working on their first website will often look for free clip art sites as a source for their web page backgrounds.
This is exactly the choice I made a few sites ago and the backgrounds I found were pretty uneven in terms of quality. Because a web page background is made up of a single image file that tiles across the page, it's important that you can't see the seams between the tiles � something that doesn't always work well with clip art backgrounds. You may also discover that the web page backgrounds on clip art sites are often just too garish or even worse, too tacky. While researching this article, I found it fascinating that a fairly large percentage of people trolling the search engines for "web page backgrounds" are actually looking for a professionally designed web page template.
Choosing a professional-grade template is the third way to give your web page a great-looking background. These ready-made web designs are not only easy to use and customize, they also look fantastic and include beautiful images and backgrounds that will absolutely put your site head and shoulders above the competition. If you start with a template, you basically just need to add great content to make your site sing. That's why, in the long run, choosing a template is the fastest and easiest way to get your web site up and running while also giving it the professional look you want.
Matt Paolini is an experienced webmaster with an interest in graphic design and website design. Visit his site at www.webpagebackgrounds.biz to learn more about web page backgrounds.
