Good Background Graphics…
I love nothing more than great use of background images in websites, especially when they are tiled to perfection (check out my own site lol).
Backgrounds are often considered an unused, waste of webspace. I have read many posts where users would rather see web pages fit to the width of the browser. My personal preference is still a nice background, with a fixed width, centred webpage sitting in the foreground. A good web background can help complement the foreground, whilst making it “step out” of the page, bringing the actual content greater prominance, and controlling the way the user sees and responds to your website.
I am also of the opinion that any webpage which is wider than 1024 pixels is actually too wide to actually read and understand well (please note I have no studies to back this up, just purely my opinion). For instance most books and magazines are of a limited width and these have “successfully been read for some time now, why should we change those dynamics to suit websites just because monitors are increasing in size?
What makes a good background? Well anything which doesn’t take the attention away from the foreground, but actually complements it and brings prominance to it. I personally like neutral or darker backgrounds with lighter foregrounds. I feel this approach helps lift the main contain from the rest of the page, it turns your browser into a frame and allows you to control the way you want people to access your content (I think I already mentioned that).
Most designers will know, trying to tile backgrounds can be diffcult and almost impossible, yet needs to be done to ensure file sizes are reduced to allow for quick web page downloads. Alas I stumbled upon this fantastic tool which allows you to customize your background images until your heart is content! Ok it doesn’t generate every type of background you could ever wish for, but does a pretty good job at generating stripes and is very Wed 2.0ish, you can find the free tool here www.stripegenerator.com - having just checked the URL the site appears to be down, dam! Should be back soon as I was only using it yesterday 
So there is now no excuse for people to just lump plain colours in backgrounds, or messy graphics which do not mesh together at the edges!
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