How To Homepage: easy website guide

Just adding a background to your site can completely change the mood!

Let's add a background to your website!

These days this is absolutely not the right way to do things. If you want to see that, please go to Backgrounds, the right way! This part has been kept in for historical accuracy's sake, but please know the rules before you break them.

Adding a single-colour background to your website

[Example]

<body bgcolor="specification">

By simply entering <bgcolor="specification"> in the body's opening tag, you can set the background colour for the whole page. Click here to learn how to specify colours.

Keep in mind that if you change the background colour, you need to balance it with the text colour. If you don't set a text colour, it will be black by default, but if you make the background black without thinking you won't be able to see anything.

I don't think you'll want to do this anyway, but a dark text colour on a dark background will be hard to read, too. Be careful.

Setting a background image

Above, we only added a colour to the background. What if we want to add a background image?

[Example]

<body background="background image URL">

If you enter this code, you'll get your image as a tiling background. You can also make your own background image by taking a photo or drawing an image, but there are also plenty of websites online with background images for usage. Many are entirely free to use, so you'd best look for them! Check out this site's list of graphic resources.

Most websites that offer graphics and resources have a terms of use. These include copyright issues, what kinds of websites they are OK with you using their stuff on, and various other rules, so please read them before you use their materials!

One more thing: when you use graphics from another website, be sure to download them to your computer and use them that way.

In theory, you could just use images by linking to the other website's file, but doing so would put a strain on the other person's resources and cause problems down the line. Plus, if they delete or move the image, you wouldn't have access to it anymore—or worse, they could replace it with something vulgar!

People are being very kind to produce graphics and hand them out for free, so don't respond ungratefully! Be a polite webmaster and follow their rules.