graphic backgrounds?

[rbrown]

Hi All,

I would like to know what goes into creating a graphic background similar to this page? As i would like to do something similar on my site.

http://www.empireonline.com/

For instance, how would you create such a background and keep the image size down??

Maybe you have examples or have done something similar??

Thanks

[fuzd]

The background on that website is 264kb, so they haven't made it magically small.

But.. if you right-click the background and save it to your own computer you can see that there isn't any graphics in the part of it that is hidden by the page content. Thats one way of keeping the size down.

Other than that its usually a matter of experimenting with file formats and compression. In the case of images with people in its usually the jpg or png format that brings the best quality/filesize. Use an image editor that allows you to preview the compressed image while you experiment with the settings and fileformats.

[skilled1]

using css, they set the background image, and set it not to tile, hen the background color is black so the bottom of the image fades to black and it looks seamless