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I recently had an opportunity to meet some bright high school students in a software engineering workshop at Ferris State University’s downtown Grand Rapids campus. I also spent some time with their instructors. If these kids are a snapshot of our future innovators, West Michigan stands an excellent chance of remaining at the forefront of technology-related industries. Our challenge will be to keep them here, or to return here, after college.

The instructors have a terrific attitude toward working with local industries and corporations to develop talent in schools like Ferris, Grand Valley and Grand Rapids Community College. I’m looking forward to strengthening Elexicon’s relationship with these instructors and schools. We have a great resource in these facilities, teachers and students and the West Michigan business community needs to support them in any way we can. They are definitely reaching out to us with bright talent and new ideas. If we’re not there to reach back, there are other cities and regions who will gladly take them.

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As a web designer, I’m always searching the internet for emerging trends and what would be considered ‘best-practice’ for how websites are being built. A layout that I see as being quite popular right now is using large background images in the design of the website, be that image a picture or a graphic of some sort. (Take our site, for example.)

Building a design this way has its advantages—you’re able to make a strong visual statement to the viewer as soon as they come to your website, breaking up the visual weight of the webpage while creating a sense of depth and drama—but there are a number of things to keep in mind if you choose a layout that implements this concept.

SCREEN SIZE & RESOLUTION
One of the most common problems with large backgrounds is that they need to work with many different screen resolutions. We as designers here at Elexicon test and re-test our sites that we build on different browsers and operating systems, as well as different screen resolutions to ensure that the designs display properly. A good resource for cross-testing on different browser platforms at once is BrowserShots.

It’s important to build the background image so that when it’s replicated in the browser, it looks correct. One way of doing this is in the way that you create the image, as well as with CSS (cascading style sheets).

As a best recommended practice, use large images above 1700 pixels wide. By doing this, you will cover almost 95% of the display sizes that are available currently. To cover the minority that may see the whole image, it’s good to blend the image into the background color of the background, which you also specify in the CSS.

BANDWIDTH
Bandwidth is the amount of data that is being moved from one place to another; specifically in this case, from the website server, to the viewer’s browser.

Large backgrounds usually equate to large file sizes which can lead to a big impact on bandwidth and as well as the way the user experiences your website. By using large graphics, a website’s load time can increase significantly.

Because of this, it’s essential that we optimize the images by using appropriate image resolution and format, as well as optimizing the website’s other resources (such as the CSS files that are being targeted, as well as Javascript files, etc.).

You can create a really impressive visual statement by working a large image or graphic into the background of your website, but it’s important that it’s done correctly. Otherwise you risk hurting the performance of your website. Rest assured that the design we build at Elexicon will accomplish this and much more.

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