Background Repeat Gives Big Visuals Without Load Lag

Sometimes you want to give your site more visual pop, but don't want art to add to the load time of your site. Images have a lot of information and can cause impatient viewers to bounce before they load. Recently I was reviewing my site in order to change the look a bit.

It was okay, but I knew it could be better. I decided that I wanted a linen look to the background...something that would further the theme of a deskpad or wallboard. I found a nice jpeg, used the slice tool and saved a slice that was 16 by 800 pixels. Then added it to css under body.





body {background-image: url(../images/Linen_05a.png); background-repeat:repeat-x;}



Since the slice was long and thin, I had it repeat horizontally. If your slice is wide and short have it repeat vertically by using "repeat y" in the command. If you are dealing with an image that is short and thin, you would repeat both x and y by just using the command "repeat".



With minimal effort and no load drag, the site went from ordinary to interesting.

You can find pictures of textures that lend themselves to slicing and experiment on your own site. It gives a little extra flair to the look, and is easy to remove if you don't feel it works.

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Winning with Wordpress

Sometimes a client wants a level of interactivity that requires more than Dreamweaver and Jscript. If you want to provide an agile site in a timely manner, consider using WordPress. It is no longer just a blog platform. WordPress has grown into useful contact management software which gives designers the utility of Php without requiring them to speak that language.

They have a variety of themes to choose from and with a little time and effort; you can use a minimal template to pretty much call your own shots. What it gives you in return is a quick, effective way to provide blogs, static pages, forums, videos and easy interface with third party software. The amazing thing is that it’s free!








While it may take some effort to feel conversant, it is more intuitive and user friendly than straight HTML and CSS. Practice makes, if not perfect, at least palatable, and there are tons of tutorials and troubleshooting pages that address most anything you may want to know.

Recently I was working on a website which needed to look like a regular website, but include a blog, forum, donation page and gallery. I knew that WordPress would have the answers I needed, and it took only a short time to discover under Reading in Settings, you can make the home page a "static" page and your blog page in blog "loop" format. See the image below.

The forum was provided by a plug-in called Mingle Forum which can be uploaded in zip format to your WordPress site. There is other forum plug-ins out there, but this looked very compatible with WordPress and proved to be so.








The point is, WordPress is a wonderful tool created to be compatible with a world of widgets that make a designer's life so much easier and productive. While I love Dreamweaver, WordPress is earning my respect as a fine content management tool which gives wings to my designs.