Oceanscape | CSS Zen Garden

CSS Backgrounds are exciting for a number of reasons. They are great for adding some intense style to your pages which stands out for your readers and increases their engagement with the pages. This is good for search engines too if you believe they measure how long your visitors spend on your website. If you ever have your website promoted somewhere as a thumbnail then the use of a memorable CSS Background will increase the chance of a visitor clicking through to your site. A good example of this is the new Google Instant Previews which display a snapshot of your site next to the search results.

Dead Metropolis

Viget Inspire

Withering Beauty | CSS Zen Garden

Legendary Aircraft

The examples above use the CSS Background technique for the main background of the site, but you can use the technique for any element – a good example is in styling list elements for navigation.

I’ll be updating this page occasionally as I find other inspiring sites so do drop me a line or leave a comment if you know a good one

If you’ve used the css background technique to create a nice image background for one of your Squidoo lenses, I’ll add it to the Top 15 list on my Squidoo CSS Background lens.

CSS Background is a style feature that allows you to add a variety of backgrounds behind the text on a web page. You can choose solid colors, or if you feel like being artistic, you can add an image.

This is a great way to spice up your web pages or Squidoo lenses. You can use it for the main body of your text – imagine a story about a beach holiday, displayed over a beautiful ocean background.

Another place where this gets used is to put simple graphics behind navigation links. These will usually be small pictures that repeat to build an attractive navigation bar.

On Squidoo you can build a link voting plexo, where visitors can add their own suggestions for links, then vote for their favorites. I’ve found this is a great way to interact with your visitors and to give them the chance to send you some feedback.

There’s space for 15 links right now. Closing soon!

One of the challenges in marketing your website (or blog, or Squidoo lens) is to make yourself different and to stand out from the crowd. One way to do this is to use stunning images, just like this amazing picture of TableTop Mountain in South Africa.

This post certainly sticks out!! It uses a technique called CSS Background, where the image is used as a background to the paragraphs of text. You can find out how to do this on my CSS Background Squidoo Lens.

There’s an additional technique here too. The paragraphs use a fine array of dots to darken them over the blue sky background. This produces a semi-transparent effect which helps the text to stand out. The text here is white, which looks pretty good. I’ll post the code for this here in a day or two.

Can you think of more ways to make yourself stand out from the crowd?