Designing websites is a love/hate skill to have. All of the compatibility issues web designers run into really eat up time and usually hinder a design’s developability. A good designer knows while he/she builds a site’s design that it needs to be codable. This usually boils down to the inevitability of building within an invisible 800px by whatever boundary, but the piece of the puzzle that’s hard to click is the background.

If you haven’t created a website before imagine this; you have to fit all of a page’s content into every visiter’s monitor space while not making the site look boring for viewers who have very large displays.

The challenge is trying to design an area that (sometimes) half of our audience may never see. A challenge that can actually be rather inspirational at times.

Twitter embraces being viewed in all resolutions and asks it’s users to upload their own custom backgrounds for their profile. Any user attempting this realises quickly the difficulty and excitement in designing under these constrictions.

Backgrounds can convey information, enforce a theme, express feelings, keep consistency, and move the viewers eye. The trick is getting your website’s background to look nice while not taking away the focus of your content. Of course that doesn’t mean you can’t have some fun while you’re at it.

Gradients or textures, fixed or tiled, you have a lot of control over how your background functions for your site. High speed internet becoming the norm, you can design big to match. Modern browser advances are allowing you to have enhanced control over your backgrounds to open up more design possibilities with features such as transparency and multiple layered backgrounds.

Using cascading style sheets a website’s background can perform many neat tricks while still being easy to create. Newer sites with that “Web 2.0 aesthetic”, as some would call it, have very appealing effects because they are simple. For fun, some beautiful examples of amazing backgrounds using basic tools can be found here.

Most successful sites have wonderful attention to detail which includes how their background plays among every user’s resolution. Some constrictions are involved in designing a good background but that’s what makes it fun to experiment and try something new while still being functional. Work from the ground up, start your next web design with a background.