The background property lets you use images and colors to create backgrounds for your web pages.
### Background Color
The background color property allows you to choose the color of your element. This can be the background for the entire page or the background of one section of your page.
* An element is a piece of HTML such as a header or paragraph on a web page.
Here is an example of setting the background color for a web page to green.
A gradient is a transition between two or more colors and can be used via CSS similar to a background image.
The syntax of a gradient background can be quite complex and is often still used with vendor prefixes due to inconsistencies between supported browsers.
The <ahref='http://www.colorzilla.com/gradient-editor/'target="_blank"rel='nofollow'>Colorzilla Gradient Editor</a> is a great online tool for generating custom gradients and the associated css markup.
### Background – The Shorthand Property
You can write the background properties on a single line. This is called the shorthand property.
```css
body {
background: url("barn.jpg") no-repeat right top;
}
```
You can leave out properties you don’t need when using the shorthand property, but the properties
must be used in a certain order. The order is:
* color
* image
* repeat
* attachment
* position
### Multiple Background Images
You can specify multiple background images in a single background property.