Backgrounds can be tricky things... some symptoms and solutions are given below!

Everyone hates my background and says they can't read stuff!!

Why does it take ages for the background to show up?

My background just doesn't fit the screen - what's going on?

1. Text isn't legible and no-one wants to read my work!!

Point one on the web design tips page said...

I used the following image, tiled in the background...

It doesn't look too bad sat there on its own, but... imagine sitting and reading an entire web report faced with that gharish nightmare staring at you! Not pleasant! Remember - simple is good. If it works with lots of different images and fonts on top of it - then you're on the right track!

Consider how long the image is going to take to load in the background of the page. Although my graphic isn't that large, some people use graphics that are the full size of the screen - definite no-no! Try to keep background images as small as possible - the one I've used for this site is only about 1KB!

Keep it tiny!!

If you've hand-crafted an image to go in the background of your page, you might be disheartened to find that it doesn't look quite right - it repeats in a strange way, bits are missing... well, it could be to do with the fact that they're using a different screen resolution to you. The most common screen resolutions are...

800 x 600 (SVGA) and 1024 x 728 (XGA)

... design your background to cope with both of these. Images that are slightly too narrow will tile horizontally across the page - leading to ugly looking repeats if you're not careful. Images that are too wide - well, bits will be missing from the right hand side!