How to Use That Really 'Vivid' Background Image

The background used on this page contains a wide variety of colours and text displayed against it is impossible to read, no matter what colour you use. To make the background useable, create a table on the page with a plain colour background and insert your text in this.

The heading is put into a separate table as are any footers for the page.

Remember when printing out a page like this, the background of the page is usually not printed. While we're on the subject of printing, we often see pages of useful information written in a light coloured text on a dark coloured background, for instance, yellow text on a dark background. If such a page is printed out, a colour printer will display yellow text on a white background - almost impossible to read. Of course you can set your page to print all text as black, but, a more user friendly approach is to provide a link to an idetical page which doesn't use the background and displays the text as black lettering on a white background - easy to read and print.

There are two ways of getting the spacing right on a page like this.

• Easy Method - Create your header, body and footer text boxes as separate tables 75% of the window width and use carriage returns to space them vertically on the page. Use a nonbreaking space after each carriage return.
• Advanced Method - Create a table with a border set to be width zero the full size of your page. Insdie this table, create your header, body and footer text boxes. Position these inside cells in the outer table and create blank space by inserting a transparent gif in empty cells and setting it's width to the width you require. The transparent gif need only be 1 x 1 pixel in size. Not got one? Download it here by right clicking on the following link and saving image/picture as trans1pixel.gif. (Left clicking the link to view the image won't do much, the image is only 1 x 1 pixel and is invisible).