h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've seen numerous sites where the creator has obviously thought 'Wow - a background crammed with animals/flowers/patterns - cool! I just have to use that one!'

...thus making it almost impossible to read the text...

The right combination of colours for background and text are important too - I once saw a very dark red text on a black background - even if I adjusted my screen to maximum lightness I had trouble reading the text...

It can be quite effective to use a table with borders taken from a picture, it looks quite cool if it's a nice texture, spices up the page and doesn't alter the legibility. Don't want to have the bordedrs too thick though!

Mel

The only way I could justify using an image for a background is if the content itself is housed in plain-coloured sections. But even then, in general I think they look horrid.

Actually, come to think of it, there's another way of doing it I think is acceptable - 'watermarks', or just one large, faint image behind the text in a single contrasting colour. But not a titled photo. Nooooo!

Sometimes textures look good, things like heavy paper textures, so long as they're in contrasting colours to the text they provide an interesting background, not dissimilar to a watermark, which is easy to read and can look quite distinguished.

The ones with a border down the left hand side aren't too bad either, though some of the designs out there look very amaturish

Mel