Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates- P2: This is the must-have book for designers who want to expand their skills and improve the quality of their designs. Learning CSS technology and continually improving one's design and developer skills is essential for every Web designer in today's marketplace. The goal of Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates is to educate beginning-to-intermediate Web designers on the various issues involved with Web design through general discussion, case studies, and specific tips and techniques | 32 Chapter 2 Designing for the Past Present and Future Figure Menu items saved as images in the On state a white glow around the text . 4. Search engines When text is saved as an image search engines don t read it although they can read the Alt tags. It s almost always a wise idea to make your site as search-engine friendly as possible. Note CSS menus can use background images in menu items. Using such a method also enables the designer to lay text over the image allowing for the best of both worlds. Such usage of background images is incorporated in many designs included with this book. Background Images Background images can enhance a Web site to give it mood and depth. While the use of background images has changed slightly over the years the concepts are fairly similar. There are several uses of background images that the designer can be creative with. The first of which is using a background image to serve as the majority or entire backdrop of a Web site while layering the HTML and graphics Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on to remove this watermark. Building on Previous Design Weaknesses 33 on top of it. While this wasn t advisable in the past it now is much more acceptable with increased bandwidth and CSS-driven layouts which require less download time. Figure illustrates a site that uses one image to serve as the entire background. Figure is the background image that was used. Another creative use of background images is giving the impression that a design has colors running down both sides of it indefinitely. Although this used to be an easy process with XHTML table sites it now takes a little trickery to accomplish the same result. Such a technique is explained in Chapter 12 however Figure illustrates the concept. A third use of background images as mentioned in the previous section is using the images for menus. Using CSS a designer can use an image for say a menu Figure Site that uses a large image for its .
