Making a custom background

Your best option is to set the background image for the body attribute, and set background: none for every element where you’d like that background to appear. This will apply the background across the entire displayed page without breaks, and have it show through on elements where you’ve stated they shouldn’t have their own background (sort of like using a transparent background layer in a PNG image).

How can I do that in the CSS? Still new to WP and CSS in general.

Ah, ok. Yes, that’s something you would set in CSS. What WordPress theme are you using?

Twenty Thirteen.

Ok. Your best course of action is to create a Child Theme. Set the background image for body inside your child theme’s style.css. Set background: none for any elements where you’d like the page background to show through.

A friend made some changes in the theme and I’m not sure where he made them. Would the child theme branch from what I have right now or would it branch from the original theme? Do I need a child theme?

A child theme is the best choice when you’re working with a theme maintained by somebody else, such as Twenty Thirteen. The benefit of a child theme is that the parent theme (Twenty Thirteen in this case) can be updated by the developers without overwriting your customizations. If you make changes to Twenty Thirteen directly, all those changes will be lost the next time an update for Twenty Thirteen comes out.

You should reach out to your friend to find out how he or she went about making the changes. If they did it right inside Twenty Thirteen, you might want to ask them to move those changes into a child theme.

I don’t see myself updating unless it’s something hugely helpful.

How can I do it normally? I’ve looked through all the categories in the Editor and haven’t found the right place for it.

I don’t see myself updating unless it’s something hugely helpful.

That’s your choice and that may work out for you but just be aware that sometimes those theme updates can be security related and you won’t want to miss those.

A friend made some changes in the theme and I’m not sure where he made them.

If you can perform a diff on your theme and Twenty Thirteen then you may be able to see what was changed. If you have a PC there are several utilities that can help you with that. In Linux it’s even easier.

I’m not interested in finding my friend’s changes – I just want to make the header the whole background.

Nobody?

Looks like you have JetPack on your site, so you can use the Custom CSS under Appearance > Edit CSS – try adding this CSS in that box:

body, .site-main {
    background: url("https://abitterdraft.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/cropped-winter-is-coming5.jpg") repeat scroll center top / 1600px auto transparent;
}

Try adding this before the html and body tags in your style.css-file:

* {
background:none !important;
}

@tokant –
It’s not recommended to modify theme files – as changes will be lost when WP is updated.

Thanks WPyogi! It made most of the background that, though the widgets are still whitesmoke.

Do you know of a way to make it so the image isn’t so clearly tiled?

Fixed the widget part on my own, only thing left is to make it less clearly tiled. I’d also like to widen the area that the post text takes up as well if you know how.