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I'll try and teach you here how to make a left-hand bordered background.

I know, it's not a wise thing, to learn others make what I like to offer them: I'm going to make myself my own competition here!

But for those who keep asking me, for those who really want to make their own backgrounds, I'll try to explain the process here. I fear you'll find it extremely easy...

In the first place: this is for PSP version 5 or 6.
Second: I strongly advice you to add a new layer for each new step in the process so, if you make a mistake or if you don't like what you just did, you can just discard of that one layer you were working on without loosing all the steps you did before!

First open the picture you want to use for the border image. I chose one of the background tiles from my own site:

pic1

Now do a shift-D: this will give you an exact copy of this image to work with, so you can close the original now and use the copy for the rest of this exercise. That way you will not accidently overwrite your original image!

If it is too large for your border, go to image > resize and give it the size you want your border to be.

Now open a new image, height is exactly the heighth of your border picture, for width I use 1200 pixels, because I want the background to fit in as many browsers as possible.

pic 2

You may flood fill this image with the color (or the pattern) you want the main part of your background to have.

Now activate pic1. Go to menu > Selections > Select all. Then go to Menu > Edit > Copy.

Activate pic2. Go to Menu > Edit > Paste as new selection. The image is inserted in pic2, and you can move it around until it is positioned exactly the way you want it to be. Especially the top and bottom are important here!

Don't deselect your selection! Go to Menu > Image > Effects > Drop shadow and apply the settings you like best. Don't be afraid here to use Ctrl-Z and try again and again!

After you press OK, your background is ready to be used.

If you want this background to become a set, you can now resize the original pic1 to the size of a button, or you can just cut out (or copy > paste) part of it to be used for the buttons, bars and dividers.

That's all folks! I told you it's simple, didn't I?

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