VIsuals - Don't overdo the background!

While it's true that a visual can speak a thousand words, be careful what words they say... especially if they say them over and over again. There are many examples of this on MySpace pages.

The most common "fouls" come from small background images repeated many times. The images may look really good on their own, but when multiplied, they create several issues.

The first is what I like to call the checkerboard effect: alternating dark and light spots all over the screen. This creates an issue where a website's text cannot be easily read... in many cases, it's downright difficult to read and visitors will leave the page very quickly if they cannot read what's going on there.

Marketing depends on contrast, and it should all point to a message. When a page has a lot of contrasting elements in so many places, a visitor's eyes get very confused.

Luckily, there are a couple simple remedies to this...

Repeating a logo as a background can be handy branding for the right kind of companies, and fading that logo to a low opacity (maybe somewhere between 10-20%, depending on the logo) will retain the repeated artwork effect and subdue the contrast so that it will be easier to put text on top of it and let it be easily read by visitors.

The other is to use a table for your text and fill the cells with a background color. While this will cover up the wallpapered image, it only does it where the table is, so the wallpaper is still visible along the sides. if your company can benefit from a "step and repeat" type of wallpaper, then this gives you the branding opportunity as well as a clean slate on which to place your text.