Simple backgrounds
If you do not specify any background for your webpage, the default text colour will be black and the default background white. This can look quite impressive with a Times New Roman or Arial (San Serif) font in black for technical pages such as this, however it is nice to have a coloured background or alternatively use a image "tiled" as the background.
Coloured backgrounds
When using a WYSIWYG editor such as Netscape
Composer, right click anywhere on the page and select "Page Properties"
Change the fifth (background colour) to your desired colour by clicking
on the white panel and selecting a colour from the drop-down dialogue.
If you choose a light colour you may wish
to retain the black text.
If you choose a very dark colour you will
probably find you will also wish to change the text colour to a pale colour.
Here are two examples:
Using an image as a background
Follow the procedure as for customising
the colour of the page, but insert a select an image file name, where it
says "Background image" ensure the image is in the same folder as the webpage
you are creating and check
use image. There are similar requirements
to have sufficient contrast between the text colour and the background
colour of the image.
Here are two examples:
Light background image, dark text
Dark background
image, light text.
Pictures can also be used as background
images and the image will be tiled, bear in mind, the larger the image
used as the background, the larger the file size and hence the slower the
page will load.
Example
of a large picture background
Fixed backgrounds
The code that is used for setting an image to use as a background image is:
<body background="image_name.jpg">
This is placed just after the closing head tag </head> ie in the body section.
If you use a WYSIWYG editor you will not normally need to bother with the code for basic pages, but for some of the special effects you will need to amend the code manually using notepad text editor.
To scroll the text by hand over a fixed background you need to amend the code to:
<body background="image_name.jpg" bgProperties="fixed"
Open the webpage in notepad
Find the portion that begins <body
background....
Add the portion in red text
Save
Open the file in Internet Explorer and
see the effect. Note this effect does not work with Netscape Navigator
Backgrounds that scroll
This is an effect that makes use of a javascript.
Below are the instructions to copy and paste HTML link code into your webpage using Windows Notepad or similar HTML webpage editor:
Select the HTML code below (by "right clicking" with
your mouse cursor inside the below code box window, then choose "select
all" from the options). Then right click again on the highlighted text
with your mouse cursor and choose "copy" from the options.
Then, open your desired webpage in Windows Notepad.
Move mouse pointer to location you require the code
to be inserted on your page (the code should be pasted into the "body"
section of your page), and left click there once to leave the flashing
cursor.
Then right click and choose "paste" from the options.
Note:
You can increase the scrolling effect speed of the
background image on the page by changing the
nIncrement = -1 part of the code to a number of
say -6 ( i.e....nIncrement = -6).
Example of a page using
this javascript.
(Note that at the present time only the newer versions
of Internet Explorer Browser can read this effect.)
Michael Fowler, January 2001