Background Images In Your Blog

Background images make the blog so much more colourful than plain old solid colour backgrounds. A background image

• Is not clickable.
• Can be seen where no foreground content is present.

Look at using a background image under the text title, for instance. Note that this is the opposite from replacing the text in the title with a picture. If you put a picture in the title, no background will be visible, unless you intentionally make the picture too small for the title space, or use a transparent .gif file for an image.

We control images using CSS rules. Look in the template for

#header-wrapper {
  width:660px;
  margin:0 auto 10px;
  border:0px solid $bordercolor;
  }

Change that to

#header-wrapper {
  width:660px;
  margin:0 auto 10px;
  border:0px solid $bordercolor;
  background-image: url(http://whatever.wherever.com/what.gif);
  background-repeat: no-repeat;
  }

The CSS object "header-wrapper" is the name for the screen area, used in most standard Blogger Layouts templates, which will contain the text blog title and blog description. Your template may use that name, or another; or you may want your background in another container altogether. If you have, separately, tweaked your header, any of the above settings may differ. Just add the "background" rule to the container which pleases you.

If you have a Classic blog, your template may or may not use a CSS rule to define the header. It may or may not use a CSS object "header-wrapper". Be aware of the possibilities. You could, conceivably, have a <div> tag, with all of the rules defined there in the HTML.

<div style="width:660px; margin:0 auto 10px;
 border:0px solid $bordercolor;">
 ...
 </div>

if so, change that to

<div style="width:660px; margin:0 auto 10px;
 border:0px solid $bordercolor;
 background: url(http://whatever.wherever.com/what.gif) no-repeat 0px 0px;">
 ...
 </div>

You can apply a background image to any area in the blog, not just the header. The Body is a popular place for a background image. If you have a large image, you won't want it to repeat.

body {
...
background-image: url('whatever.wherever.com/what.gif');
background-repeat:no-repeat;
...
}

One recently popular variation on the plain old background image is one that stays in place on the page, as the reader scrolls.

body {
...
background-image: url('whatever.wherever.com/what.gif');
background-repeat:no-repeat;
background-attachment:fixed;
...
}

This blog, for instance, has

body {

...

background: #dadadc url(http://themes.googleusercontent.com/image?id=1H4RPagP3NxwlkCrVuQKUYUd5snXvaKTagGtkdgXEgve0VpSn-G5s8eBYdMsiQzVSvRpe) no-repeat fixed top center

...

}

You are welcome to examine page source, and find the "Body" CSS rule. Then, look at my later article "Creating A Floating Background ..." for adding the floating background under the posts.

With any large screen area, your image may be smaller than the area being covered. You might not want "norepeat" - so your background image gets reused, repeatedly, in a checkerboard pattern, over the entire area. Many background images tile, so they automatically fill the body of the blog.

body {
...
background-image: url('whatever.wherever.com/what.gif');
...
}

For more information, see the W3Schools tutorial: CSS Background.