Introduction | Removing the Frame | Simple Profile Backgrounds | Add a Banner or Two | Faux Frame Style | Making a New Frame | Create a Blog Style Background
A blog style background is basically one image which fills the whole page and has a plain center usually from top to bottom and sides of color and/or graphics. They are designed to be use on blog websites. If you take a look at our pages, there is a similarity at Dogster/Catster in that we have a plain center with colorful sides.
(The samples shown are half the size wide, 512 pixels, of the originals which are 1024 pixels wide and have been marked with the web blog address of where I found them.)
I was surfing the web one day looking for free digtial scrapbook kits to use for my cats' pages. Most scrappers use blog sites to display their designs. I ran across one and thought what a neat background. I poked around it a bit and discovered what I thought were several images was instead one large image. I visited some other scrapper blog sites of which most have absolutely wonderful backgrounds. That lead me to websites with FREE backgrounds for blogs! Eureka!
Many blog backgrounds are of a ratio of 4:3 (standard). So an image that is 1200 pixels wide will 900 pixels high. I found the center part is usually a square so it would be 900 pixels wide in this example. Most blog backgrounds come in sizes of 1600 x 1200, 1450 x 1100 or 1024 x 768. The pages at Dogster and Catster are designed to fit a 17" monitor at the present time. That size would be 1024 pixels wide so we will probably want to use the 1024 x 768 size. If you like one of the bigger ones, just resize it to 1024 pixels wide. Of course you can use the larger sizes as is. It all depends on the look you want.
There are images that are the 16:10 aspect ratio or "widescreen" type. These images are usually 1920 x 1200 in size. Right now these do not fit as well as the 4:3 ratio images on our pages. Again be your own judge on this.
There are also backgrounds which are 1024 pixels wise but maybe only 100, 200 or 300 pixels high. These are designed to tile and can be a very nice look.
Use the blog style image for the background on the BODY. Remove the frames and make the profile content transparent. That's it. You are done. You can now do the little extras like change the font colors, add a banner, make areas like the stats box and footer transparent, put in a different background for the gifts box or whatever little touches you want to add.
Here are a couple of sites with blog style backgrounds that I have run across...
Simply Chic Blog Backgrounds ==> Simple but nice size for our pages.Images labeled as "header" are what we call banners on our pages. The headers are designed to fit within the center area.
Here are some samples from Allie Brown's Layouts...
You can also try searching for more backgrounds. Try using Google, Ask or Yahoo and one of these phrases... "backgrounds for blogs" or "blogger backgrounds".
