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To create a background for your page, you got to have a picture first. This could be a photograph you scanned in, a "snapshot" (for everybody who knows about the SGI's) or simply a picture that you have created in a drawing programm. You only should keep in mind, that the format has to be GIFF or JPG. RGB, TIFF and BMP for instance are ignored by most of the browsers, but of course you can do your own experiments if you wish ;-)
Doesn't the background make this page much more "alive"? But anyways there are still some bugs to get rid of.
The picture used for the background is smaller than the page. In order to fill all the space the browser "stics together" a number of copies, and you can see the borders of every single picture very well.
What can you do? In the first solution the picture fills all the page. But this may slow down the loading of the page. And, you can achieve the same effekt of the too small picture, if you resize the browser window.
That is why one can mostly find backgrounds where many very little pictures are used - see this one.
But what you also can see here is that the background colors and the text are pretty much conflicting. It helps only a little to print the links bold. Of course you could choose a different background color, but I like the blue very much and won't change it! So it would be good to be able to change the colors within your text or even for the links.