To background or not to background

A lot of sites use backgrounds. And a lot of sites dont use backgrounds. For instance out of the top two biggest sites on the internet, MSN.com use a background (dark blue) and Yahoo.com do not.

M World does use a background, and our previous steps of evolution for the site did too. Oursite site used a background of dark brown which covered the whole page. We used white and yellow fonts for that site so you could see the text. But if there is no thing I want to pass on in this article, is that you keep the color behind your text and page content white. Do whatever you want to the background of the page, but the table or the layer where all your content is - keep it white.

Websites are always tricky things. Do you make it a fixed width or a varible width? What happens if a user with a huge screen or a user with a tiny screen visits your site? Backgrounds help to section off the content from unused space. It fills the void where white open spaces are left. It also helps visitors to focus on the content. It can gradually fade in like on MSN:

background - dark blue
Navigation round outside - lighter blue
Navigation inside main navigation - lighter brown
Main content - white

Which each layer that goes round, the colors get lighter until you reach white were the users attention is drawn.

Backgrounds are good for

• Sectioning off fixed width sites
• The footer of websites
• To show where content ends and empty space begins
• When you have a lot of empty space

Backgrounds are bad if

• The go all round the edge (applies to most sites but not all)
• They contrast too strongly
• The same color is used for them as the navigation strips

Conclusion

Look at the list below and see where your site goes. Although the best advice I can give you is try your page with and without a background and see which looks best.