Yes, I designed the main Clyde & Co web site. We ended up using a commercial CMS for that one - it’s a surprisingly large and complex site with sections in Russian, Arabic, Portuguese and Spanish, and our judgement was that we needed the support that a CMS vendor can provide (such as training the various content editors). I’ve heard that 0.97 will deliver some more of the features of enterprise level systems (like an new cache system to allow >5000 documents), and I would love to use it for one of our larger projects at some point.
To create a background image that scales with the browser window is actually quite easy:
Lets say in the html you have an image with id="bg", and below it a div with id="page", which contains all your page content. In the CSS add these rules:
html, body { height: 100%; margin: 0; padding: 0; }
#bg {position:fixed; bottom:0; left:0; width:100%; height:100%;}
#page {position:relative; z-index:1; }
That’s it for proper browsers. To get it to work in IE6 (which doesn’t support position:fixed on anything except the body tag), you need to add the following:
* html, * html body {overflow-y:hidden; overflow-x:hidden; }
* html #bg {position:absolute; z-index:-1; }
* html #page {position:static; height: 100%;}
As to the size of the image, you need to work out the biggest screen size that your target audience is likely to be using. Let’s say 1600 x 1200. Now take off the browser chrome (around 40px horizontally and 180px vertically). That leaves you with an image 1560px wide by 1020px tall. Now you may find, as I did, that your image still looks good at 125% larger than actual size, which means you can afford to reduce the image size. So, 1600/1.25-40 = 1240 wide, 1200/1.25-180 = 780 tall.