Here is a fun way to make your own seamless tiled backgrounds for your page. A nice home page is the first thing most people will see when they visit your site for the first time.
I have learned how to do this through making Outlook Express stationery. I find there are many similarities between the two. I have used this same method for making backgrounds for both pages and my stationery.
You need to start with an image that has some interest to it. For our example we will use this picture of a cat at right. But we won’t use the cat at all.
For our purposes, we will use a small section of the floral area. You need to be a bit familiar with your own picture editing program that you might have such as: Picture It, PhotoImpact, and even the Paint one that came with your computer.
Open up your pic in your program and select an area to be cropped out. We will only use a bit of the flower area such as this one on the left.
Save this in a folder on your computer. I have a folder on my desktop just for this.
Now comes the fun stuff! You will need to download a special program from the internet. It’s called 20/20 and it is a great program for making seamless tiled backgrounds. Don’t worry! It’s a small file and best of all it’s free! (my favorite word)
Here is the link:
http://www.hotfreeware.com/2020/download.htm
After it’s downloaded and installed, open it up. You will notice that it only takes up a small section at the top of your screen. Click File, Open and open up your saved cropped image. Now see the tabs at the top? Click the one that says Image. Now we want the second icon from the right called Muted Backgrounds. Click that.
Another window opens up. It’s called Muted Backgrounds Effect. Do you see a sample of your cropped image in the center? Good. Notice the slider thingie at the bottom? That will fade out your image if you desire. Sometimes it makes a nice effect if you have a particularly strong image and want to tone it down a bit.
Slide it to the left and see what effect it has on your picture. When you are happy with it, click the button on the left that says Preview. And you will get a preview of your background.
If you don’t like it, click the little "x" in the top right corner of that window to go back to the previous area.
If you like what you have, click apply and your new background is locked in. Save your background in a folder to use as you wish. I always add bg on the end of my background file names so I will know what they are with a quick glance. Eg. Flowerbg.jpg for the above sample.
Here is a larger sample of the just completed background. I've put it in it's own table for viewing.
Use your custom background anywhere. And the best thing of all is that you have made it yourself. You will not have to provide links to another site either. When you have a holiday or a special occasion, you will not have to hunt the web for a suitable background to fit it, you can make your own!
Hope this has helped.
If you want to exactly match your border color to one of the colors in your background, custom or otherwise, this is what you can do:
- You can use the basic color codes which come with the Groups, but I found them a bit of a pain.
- This way gets you an exact match: You will have to download another small, free program though.
It is called Eyedropper and here is the link: http://www.inetia.com/eyedropper_download_eng.php
It is a little Eyedropper tool that you hover over your background until you find the color or colors that you like. Here is a background to use as an example:
Click on your Eyedropper icon to open it up.
This is what you will see:
Hover the Eyedropper’s pointer arrow (which will not show in a screen shot) over the background. Find a color that you like. Do you see the six-digit number at the lower-middle section of the Eyedropper tool? Not the one enclosed in the parentheses. We want the one just beside the little square of color. For our example, we are using these numbers: C8C0C8. To close the program, just double-click the icon that is residing in your system tray at the bottom of your computer screen.
Use those numbers when you make your table by inserting them as your BorderColor. Here is the same background with the new border color:
You can obtain different effects with your background just by simply changing the border color, width, et
