Background Image Takes Forever to Load

[joe1182]

Does anyone have any recomendations on how large a background image should be? I have a 800x600 image as my background for my web page I then paste in my text and menu's to complete the web page. I am just testing this out but, I am noticing that the background image rarely loads which makes the page look rather silly. Does anyone have any tips on what I should do? Cut the image down? Thanks

[limbo]

800x600 is too small. Many users use 1027x768 + I'd re-think your design. Do you really need a background image? the bandwidth and load times are an issue as you mention, but if your site doesn't look good without you may alienate users who do not uses images, those who have user style sheets and dial up connections. This is a judgement call on your behalf but the technique you describe should be used sparingly and your content must look good without it.

You might want to use tiling techniques - this uses a small images repeated many times to create a background. Done well these can look great. The other option would be to make the images resize - but this can look very distorted. The only other thing I can think of is to use flash. Vector images created in flash resize without any loss of quality (dependant on image type) so your background would look good at any screen size. However I have never tried this - & flash may not allow you to present HTML in a layer above the player....