Understanding pasteboard and page backgrounds

[Artyboots]

Hello all,

I have happily migrated to Xara Designer Pro 7 for our company web design. But I am coming from a program that handled background images and object properties differently, so am still very much finding my way.

Please see this lovely site designed by the talented Kitty Mead.

http://leawellstudio.com/

It illustrates my point. In Netobjects, to do this, you set a background colour in the sitestyle menu, set the background tile using the body tag in the text styles or CSS menus, and place the decorative paragraph graphics as backgrounds in individual text boxes or layout regions.

I think layered designs like this would probably be achieved by a combination of features and tweaks, but cannot work out how. I can get a background colour on the pasteboard as well as a design - using a Tweak. But doing it this way means that the design does not align properly - at least not so far as I have been able to achieve.

Would love to know the views of the experts here, particulary those who also use Netobjects Fusion.

Many thanks, guys.

Ali

PS please Xara. Don't inflict full CSS menus on us (I started to dislike Fusion intensely when that happened) but please let us be able to tick which way we want our backgrounds to scroll. Merci beaucoup...

[handrawn]

as this is a webdesign question I've moved it to the web design forum
très bon

[Artyboots]

Sorry, I didn't notice where I was - my default position....

[gwpriester]

I still use NetObjects for very large websites. But NOF feels very clunky and non-intuitive compared to Designer Pro or Web Designer. NOF is like a lead weight sometimes. Whereas Designer Pro gives me so much design control and freedom to just design.

I think the easiest way (that sounds so facile) is to make your page size very large. Create the large background illustration and apply it as the page background. You can drag and drop a complementary color onto the pasteboard in case someone's monitor extends beyond the boundaries of the page. In fact this appears to be what she has done with the page background illustration fading into the pasteboard background color.

Then add your content over the page background. You can recreate the mouse over thumbnails using layers for each image and using the Mouse-over Link to Layer option.

I agree, Lea's site is quite lovely and fun to visit.

[Artyboots]

Hi Gary

Didn't realise it was so simple. I will play with that later. Thanks very much.

Ali