I thought I should explain why a new background image was needed. If you can all remember the old background image, it was rather large. It even spewed off the sides of my 21.5" ultra widescreen monitor.
If a background image is say 1000x1000 pixels, it will repeat 4 times on a resolution of 2000x2000 pixels. Remember that this is based on area. Repeating backgrounds do NOT look good. The solution? Make a HUGE background image. The problem with that is people with smaller resolutions will see only part of the image. There is such a variation in screen size nowadays it's almost impossible to make things universal.
There is another thing you can do though. You can do what I did when I made this background image. This is the original background image itself:
http://i41.photobucket.com/albums/e294/mr3...bgwithstars.jpgProbably not what you were expecting huh? There's a lot of the background image that you can't see. If we position this HUGE background image so that it's on the bottom left corner of the screen and doesn't repeat, it will look good on any sized resolution up to the amount of pixles in the image (in this case 2560x1600).
The old background image didn't work because part of the leaf was always cut off unless you had a 28" monitor or above. On a 15" non widescreen monitor at it's maximum resolution you couldn't even see the leaf!
But not to worry. There is a new solution to this problem. It has plagued web designers since the days of image backgrounds, but it hasn't been such an issue until recently. Most people didn't have these huge monitors and such. CSS3, which is still unsupported by all browsers has a background stretch option. The image will automatically fill 100% of the screen regardless of your screen size or resolution. Unfortunately it will take several years for this to be fully supported in all browsers. Because of this, a new background image had to be made.
I hope I've explained this so you can understand. If you have any questions regarding web design and the application of image backgrounds, please let me know.