Wide's World

Elevator music for adult webmastering

by

Widearea

Porno-Graphix

I am going to tap lightly so as we may listen to the silence of our commerce. That is, the nonexistent sound of sales lost and missed opportunity. I will tread softly on the keyboard as we pay tribute to the background music of the adult webmaster's world. It cannot be reiterated enough. Graphics suck. They suck our money. Graphics are a waste of our time, a waste of file space, and a waste of our digital heritage. Unless, of course, it gives us the edge we need to make sales.

This week we will deal with creating background images for our sites. Remember, it's that intangible element that makes signups. It's like some sort of zen koan, or you know, like in the Karate Kid -- "Good karate come from inside." Good websites (the ones that can sell our products) are original, and that compels our surfers to want more. It is my primary concern in discussing creating graphics for our sites that we consistently ensure any graphic element we produce is made for making sales and making sales only.

If you are looking to break out of the pack, only your creativity will open the floodgates. OK, enough bullshitting.

That Darn Toolbar Again

For our jaunt today we will want to get comfortable with the paintbrush tool, the pencil tool and the elliptical marquee tool. Shown below is the Photoshop toolbar. Hopefully you have a paint program with similar tools.

Small is good

The beauty of the background image is that when implemented in your html pages it is automatically tiled seamlessly, which allows us to create infinite designs and patterns at very little expense of data.

1. Select File -> New and create an image 1 pixel wide by 4 pixels high.

2. Select the zoom tool in the toolbar. Click in the image area to zoom in 800-1600%.

3. Select the pencil tool in the toolbar.
4. Click the foreground swatch in the toolbar to bring up the color picker.

5. Select the color for your background tile.
6. Click on your canvas to paint two pixels of the selected color.
7. Repeat steps 4-6 for the second color of your tile image.

8. Export image as a .gif file.

The resulting image will be tiled over our web page's background, creating a color and texture. We see how a simple, small image consisting of just a few pixels can create some interesting effects. With a little creativity and some precise pixel plotting, there are no limits to what can be done to induce some unique web pages. What's more, these tiles should generally result in files measured in bytes rather than kilobytes.

Continued ..