Subtle Patterns is a popular design resource for finding free, lightweight backgrounds to customize your website. Here you will find patterns that are easy on the eyes and tile perfectly to create pleasant backgrounds.
Subtle Background Patterns is a new plugin that lets you incorporate Subtle Patterns into the WordPress background customizer. It allows you to easily add any of 300+ beautiful background patterns to your site, without having to customize your theme’s CSS file.
The best feature of this plugin is the Live Preview of patterns, which allows you to cycle through all patterns on your own website and save the one you want to use. The Live Preview shows up on the frontend of your site so you can see how the background would look with your current design and content.
When you add a pattern as a background, it is added to your WordPress media library. The plugin does not save all of the patterns to your server – only the ones you select for use on your website. If your theme does not have support for WordPress background images, after installing this plugin it will.
Subtle Background Patterns is an especially useful plugin if you have one of the default themes active and simply want to add a little more character to the design. Download Subtle Background Patterns from the WordPress plugin repository to get access to any of the 300+ backgrounds for free.
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This is a valuable addition to the collection, Sarah. I haven’t done much with backgrounds for my clients. The choices are just about infinite and one could spend a lot of time on them, something my prices don’t warrant. Now with this plugin I can show them what they can do, and they can browse to their heart’s content!
Well, I was almost ready to send a tutorial to my clients to let them know how to use this, but in trying it on a second site. I ran into problems. For one thing, if I deactivate the plugin to get rid of the ugly green promo bar at the bottom, I lose the background installation.
I also see on the WordPress.org some strangeness. A new 0.2 version is announced but the link gives a 404 error. There is also a message at the top: This plugin hasn’t been updated in over 2 years. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.
I’ll have to visit this tomorrow and see if things are any clearer.
The actual subtle patterns site suggests this plugin, which hasn’t been updated in a year but it’s still newer than the other one:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bg-patterns/
Subtle Background Patterns was added to the repo on 1/13/2013 and is the newest one available.
Hey, i am Marcus, the creator of this plugin and quite happy that it is featured on WPMU!
The Plugin Repo servers had some serious troubles until yesterday, but now since Version 1.0 it is working fine and not displayed as not updated since 2 years. ( That wasn`t correct btw, i released the plugin 3 days ago…;) )
So now everything should work fine for you and your clients, have fun with this plugin!
Would be glad to hear from you:
http://www.facebook.com/clubdesign.mp
http://plugins.clubdesign.at
Greets Marcus
The version 1.0 link became active for me yesterday, so I gave it a trial run. It looks very good in all respects, so I sent a tutorial email to my clients.
The developer is very responsive to concerns.
Sarah, if you could do more blogs like this I would appreciate it. I am an experienced coder but new to design. I would like to know where designers are getting backgrounds, call to actions, buttons, etc…
Thanks for the comment. You’re in luck! We’ve got a design-oriented blog scheduled to publish tomorrow. :)
Thanks!
I hope you reveal another design gem like the aforementioned site.