Website background design

During the development of web design for the site pages it is very important to pay attention to website background design (that of the whole page and its separate elements). Simple white background is considered a traditional variant – it helps to perceive the text in the best way. Shades of white – beige, cream – also do not prevent from perceiving textual information. However, quite often customers find websites with simple white background too dull and unvaried. In this case the developer has to choose another background color or use a background image. What should you take into account when you use a background image or a colored background in design of your site?

It is a common knowledge that different colors are perceived in different ways. And every person has its own associations between a certain color and an object or a feeling it embodies. For example, representatives of the Western culture traditionally associate black color with death, and people of some countries of the Eastern culture, on the contrary, associate death with white color. We also traditionally associate red color with blood or danger, green – with grass or leaves, blue – with the sky or water, yellow – with the Sun. These associations have become firmly embedded in human consciousness, and it is very hard to convince the visitor that, for example, a company which has a website with red background is stable and reliable. Red color is too dynamic for it, whereas green color gamma evokes the feeling of calmness and tranquility.

Too bright background color is too tiring for the eyesight, it prevents the visitors from reading and perceiving the information. Therefore if you have decided to choose a background color different from white it would be better to choose a pastel shade depending on the theme of the site. For example, very light pale pink shades will be excellent for background of various sites for women devoted to children, family, cosmetics etc.

For website background design special colors are used. They are called web-safe colors. Some time ago the notion of web-safe colors was widely used in web design. To web-safe colors we refer a palette of 216 colors that was could be shown on 256-color (8-bit color) displays without dithering. Why were these very colors chosen? These palette matched the palettes selected by the leading browsers. Now the notion of web-safe colors is not crucial for website background design. Today personal computers usually have 24-bit color, and mobile devices have at least 16-bit color, therefore they can show more than 256 colors simultaneously.

You can set the background not only for the whole page, but also for a separate element, for example, a particular cell, line or paragraph.

Along with one-color backgrounds gradient backgrounds are also very popular and are widely used in website background design. To set a gradient background two color that blend smoothly are used. You can also use one color to set a gradient background; in this case its brightness will gradually reduce from the maximum to the zero value. The use of gradients in website background design is appropriate only in some cases. Firstly, gradient backgrounds are suitable for fixed-width website layout where all elements have their fixed places that do not depend on the user's display resolution. Secondly, you should use gradients only in those cases when you are aware of technical characteristics of the monitors of your potential target audience, otherwise smoothness of the gradient may be disrupted by aliasing.

When a one-color or a gradient website background seems not enough, web designers often resort to the use of background images. In this case copies of one image fill the space of the site page like mosaic or tile. The use of background image will certainly influence on the duration of site pages loading, therefore an image used for background tiling should be neither too large nor too small. It is quite understandable why the image should not be large, but why not too small? The answer is simple. When the site page loads from the server, the browser saves the background image in the cash memory and then tiles the background. If there are too many “pieces of mosaics” it will take more time to put them together. It may sound ironic, but a tile background consisting of 25x25 pixel images will load slower than a tile background that consists of 50x50 pixel images.

To sum up everything that has been mentioned above we can draw several conclusions:

• Colors are perceived by different people in different ways.
• Background color should not prevent from perceiving textual information on the site.
• Background image should not considerably increase the time of site pages loading.

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website background design, website background, web page background, background color, background image, gradient