Hi. I'm designing a website for a photographer friend and i've come up with this design. The problem is the background image. I want it to fill up the entire width of the page regardless of what resolution the viewer is viewing the page at. I've considered stretching the image of loading different images depending on resolution, but i don't know how that can be done or if they're the wisest thing to do. Does anyone have any advice?

Very nice, but if you stretch the original image, all it's going to do is distort that nice background.

The only thing I can suggest is perhaps trying to get the edges of the background to blend so that it sorta tiles horizontally w/o distorting the image.

I agree it's a nice image. The way to do what you want is to use a relative width on the image. Set the width to 100% and it should stretch. The problem though is just as LadynRed described. The image will get distorted and isn't going to look good at every resolution.

Another idea might be to keep this image centered in the background and then use a background color (matching one of the gray's in the image) for larger resolutions.

If you let the browser resize the image, its not going to look great. For a lot of people this wouldn't be that much of an issue, but if you're building a web site for a photographer, you want all the photographs to look as good as possible.

You won't be able to make it fit the exact width of the browser ( except when a broken clock is right twice a day ), but you can come pretty close if you use javascript to figure out how wide the screen is, and loading an appropriate version of the photo. You'd want to pre-shrink them to different sizes in Photoshop, and apply a little bit of USM ( say 160 % at 0.2 px ) afterwards.

PS - You might want to change the text on the side ... "in color or black and white" sounds redundant, doesn't read well.

Yes, i've considered that. Looks like i've got more thinking to do. Thanks all. If i did, however, decide that the distortion wasn't going to have a significant effect, would i have to place the photo as a back ground image or just an image placed behind the main content? I can't imagine how the former would work with relative widths, though i suppose it might be possible. At the moment tiling seems a more promising (and also simpler) solution.

@ForrestCroce: Oh, that's just dummy text. Didn't want to use lorem ipsum so my friend could have some idea what it might be used for.