There are two common types of poor background wrapping: The background image isn't wide enough The background image doesn't tile properly When the background image isn't wide enough, you get a very annoying effect. Take a look at the good and bad versions of a page to see examples of this. You might think that a 600-pixel width is sufficient for a background image, but I know people with browsers that they open to 1600-pixels in width, and they'll spot those mistakes, even if you can't see them on your own monitor. When the background image doesn't tile properly, it's a different issue-- it's not always bad for this to be the case, but it's generally annoying. It makes pages look choppy and not at all particularly fluid. Take a look at these two styles of tiling. For further examples, here's the old version of a page I did several years ago, and the better quality, updated version