Ray's Test Pages - User Changeable Options - Images

For a while now I've been looking at ways to brighten up the design of the site. In the end I decided that this site will be one of the most user configurable on the Internet. I want the visitor, if they want, to be able to choose their own menu type, background image or colour, and font type and colour. I want them to be able to choose if they want the change in style to apply to the site while they are visiting just for this session or to remain persistent and remain the same each time they visit it.

Is there a way to get rid of the background image without using a transparency?

Can the visitor choose their own image from one on their computer?

One way to display the images is to put them in a JavaScript array. If the images were numbered consecutively then a simple loop would make up the filenames and add them to the array. The images below are displayed by an array.

The images below have been added programmatically, clicking on any of them makes that particular image the background. As I want to use some of these images for the site, I've added all the ones below to a directory called "common". There is one problem with having this many images and that is they have to be downloaded to the client computer. These 100 images take up around 480Kb - which means there are too many for the average user on a dial-up connection. It would be far easier if I only provided around a dozen background images.