another newbie – what size should my background image be
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Hi – I’m building a site in the twentyten template and trying to format a photo for my background so that it will be the right size and not be altered when I upload it. What is the correct size to do so?
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The problem you run into with fixed, non-tiling, images is that you have no control over the visitor or their system. If you upload a 1200px wide image and your visitor has their browser window set to 1800px wide, then they are going to see blank areas to the sides of the image. If they have a large wide-screen monitor such as I do and have their browser window maximized (in my case 2560px wide) then I would see a lot of blank space.
Also the larger the image, the larger the file size, even if you save it as a low-quality jpg, and that means your site pages load slowly. This causes two issues. One, people have low tolerance for slow loading websites and might get frustrated and just click away and go elsewhere. Two, the search engines are now considering page loading times when calculating page rank, and the slower your pages load, the less page rank they are going to give you.
With some images, you can select a background color that closely matches or compliments the edges of the image, but with most images the borders are not consistent in color, so one place might be nicely blended between the image and the background color, but in another place it might not.
Wherever possible I tile background images, and that typically means the image has to be graphic in nature and top/bottom and left/right edges have to match so that the tiling is seamless.
You can see an example of a tiled background on my blog here at http://opposablethumbz.wordpress.com/ . Not how it is virtually impossible to see the edges of the individual images. This is the image used: http://opposablethumbz.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/blueblur.jpg .
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You’re welcome and sorry I could not be more definitive, but there really isn’t a definitive answer.
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