what size background image works best? I have tried over 100 images and gifs, and they all get stretched, and blurry. usually 1/2 the image isn’t even viewable
You’re going to want something fairly large in dimension and in a landscape orientation (but watch out for file size too, you don’t want to force everyone to download a huge image).
For example, I accidentally took this photo of my couch. The dimensions are 1920 x 1440 and it fits my screen as a background image (text is unreadable over it, but that’s a separate issue).
Note that the image is set to background-size: cover; by default — so this means that the image will be scaled-up to fill the entire browser window without repeating the image (and likely cropped somewhat unless my window is in the same 4:3 ratio as the image). Small images will be sized up proportionately until they fit the entire window. You can change this behavior using CSS for the category, for example:
body.category-example {
background-size: 25%:
}
Now your background image is much smaller, and tiled to fill the screen.
You’ll want to work with background-size, background-repeat, and background-position in your site’s CSS to find out which properties will work for your specific image.
9 Likes
Can we add this tip to the UI for the feature, somewhere?
1 Like
All of your CSS is controlled under admin > customize > themes, by “CSS for the category” I meant that you can target a specific category because we add CSS classes to the page when relevant.
So in the case of a category named “Other” we add the .category-other class to the page’s body tag, so you can use something like this in your general customizations to target that specific category.
body.category-other {
// your CSS for the category here
}
8 Likes
What is a recommended size for Category background say width?
Also looking for recommended sizing for doing a Category Image.
Both vary a lot based on what effect you’re trying to achieve…
For background images… probably as wide as you can get while keeping the file size reasonable (say maybe under 150k or so? a service like https://tinypng.com/ can help reduce filesize). Probably in the range of 1440px - 1920px wide…
For category logos/images I personally like squares, around 150px or so… but if you’re customizing the layout otherwise really any size/orientation can work well.
2 Likes
Since there are some limitations with this website, I sometimes use https://pngquant.org/. It has an executable and will do the same job without these limitations, and I think it uses the same compression method.
4 Likes