It’s time to address a serious concern in the adult industry. You may not realize it, but there’s an epidemic running around, and if you’re not careful, you’re bound to catch it. Spanning the globe, this often overlooked disease can cost you sales, crash people’s browsers, and whack your hard earned traffic levels by 30 percent or more.It’s time to address a serious concern in the adult industry. You may not realize it, but there’s an epidemic running around, and if you’re not careful, you’re bound to catch it. Spanning the globe, this often overlooked disease can cost you sales, crash people’s browsers, and whack your hard earned traffic levels by 30 percent or more. Be wary: If you’ve spent any amount of time checking out other webmaster’s sites, I’m sure you’ve been exposed to it:

Obnoxious Background Syndrome.

O.B.S. isn’t a laughing matter. We’ve all seen amateur hardcore sites that sport the ever-present, tiled background image of some willing lass riding a well groomed wong. Set up in full color, these repeating background images often load slow, and when they finally appear, they utterly annihilate any text the webmaster may have intended for the horny, happy surfer. No doubt you’ve stumbled into sites that seem to have a pleasant facade until a “stylish” calico texture destroys the page. All are victims of O.B.S…. He’s why you need to be careful when playing with background images, and how you can avoid becoming another casualty of O.B.S.:

Backgrounds can make pages difficult to read

The simple fact is, what looks good on your monitor might create aesthetic havoc on the screens of your intended viewers. When you place a background image on a page, the way your monitor is calibrated might make the text appear relatively easy to read over your spunky image. What looks tasteful to you might actually be preventing sufers from seeing important links such as “Click here for a trial membership!” Get the picture?

Backgrounds can cause enormous load times

One of the symptoms of O.B.S. is a seemingly infinite load time on a simple page of text. Sure, your “hungstuds.jpg” 200 x 400 background image may be just the thing to spice up your page, but consider the lowly 14.4k modem user and his 486 DX2-50. You’re killing the surfer’s browser. In addition to long load times, it may be difficult for older video cards to handle the scrolling and displaying of constantly tiled images. Since backgrounds REPEAT in many browsers (Netscape, for instance), the end user’s video card and RAM is eaten alive by your sexy graphic. In this instance, what you thought might be helping you make the sale is actually ensuring you’ll get fewer of them.

Backgrounds don’t always look the same across different resolutions

Suppose you’re going for the large, single-image background effect. You want something pleasant, like your favorite “lickinglabia.jpg” to frame the page just perfectly. Wait, though, O.B.S. is just around the corner! Suppose lickinglabia.jpg is a 640 x 480 pixel image, which is ideal for your personal browsing preferences; you may have made sure it’s compressed well, but you’re probably forgetting that more and more users are using higher resolutions, and larger desktop sizes. The image you thought framed your page nicely is actually a garrish, hideous, ever-repeating, poorly-offset distraction to your 800 x 600 surfer.

These are just a few of the dangers of O.B.S. As always, compress your images correctly. Sometimes a .gif is more effective for a single color background image, and sometimes a highly-compressed .jpg image is just the thing. Remember to play with compression and figure out the point of optimal trade off.

Don’t forget, though: The best way to avoid O.B.S. is just to skip the background altogether. Ask yourself: Is it worth it? Does it help sell my site? If you design a background and fall in love with it, let it sit for a day and ask yourself if O.B.S. might be on your horizon.