backgrounds on pages

Elisa Welch (elisa@pss.com)
Thu, 4 Dec 1997 14:36:25 -0800

Hello All-

I'm a new member of Art Net, a Left Coast Neoceltic Folk musician, if you
will. I've been refining some pages I used to have in a tiny space on
CompuServe. My home page is at http://www.art.net/~elisa/

I've scanned in photos of myself playing various instruments and then
played lots of Photoshop tricks with the images, since the original photos
were nothing to write home about. It's amazing how cool a picture looks
with the colored pencil filter, for example. (Spoken like a true graphics
newbie, I'm sure.)

I'm actually using a few of these treatments as backgrounds on some of my
subpages:

http://www.art.net/Studios/Music/Elisa/calendar.html
http://www.art.net/Studios/Music/Elisa/links.html
http://www.art.net/Studios/Music/Elisa/lyrics.html

Now, although I like the way they look, *I* find these backgrounds
excruciatingly slow, but perhaps that's because I tend to have little
patience for waiting around for big hefty graphics to load. However, I
figure most of the Art Net artists use lots of complex, large graphics
files and that by comparison, my backgrounds might actually be sort of in
the "average" range. Then again, in those other folks' cases, after you
wait and wait you're rewarded with someone's incredible original artwork,
whereas on my pages all you're getting are self-serving background pictures
behind the text, which is the real meat of the site...

So, I guess I'm looking for opinions:

Are my background images are ridiculously out of whack?

Should I try other file formats (perhaps gif instead of jpg would be more
efficient, for example)?

Should I create less busy/distracting backgrounds instead of using pictures?

Any other comments/suggestions on design wil be most welcome, too!

I'm still very new to the "graphics on the Web" game, but I figure this is
an excellent place to do some larnin' :)

thanks in advance for your input
Elisa