This page: GRAPHICS: Making a Background - Page 2.

SURFING IN THE DARK ...A Beginner's Odyssey
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		3. APPLYING HYPERTEXT	6. GRAPHICS	.
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SIMPLE BACKGROUND CONSTRUCTION # 2
Finishing Touches

This effective BG is also 1100 wide, with a simple colored band at the left. Note, however, that there is a slight 3-D effect with the light band appearing to overlap the dark page body.

It's a very simple trick with your graphics progam:
You start, of course, with the body image at something like 50x1100, then select a portion at the left and bucket fill with the border color....resulting in a simple 2-color background. The division between the two colors is stark, harsh, and uninteresting.

Increase magnification perhaps 4 times so you can see what you're doing. Now use the selection tool to select a full-height (e.g., 50 pixels in this example) rectangular area about 8 pixels wide, and centered over the dividing line between the 2 colors (that is, so that your selected area's width contains 4 pixels of the light border and 4 of the body color.) Apply Image Blur/Soften as many times as needed to achieve a good-looking transition between the two colors.

Needed adjustment will vary among different color combinations. Variations in width of selected area and number of Blur/Soften applications will yield differing effects - experiment until you find the right combination for your chosen colors.

Obviously, this technique may also be used to soften the transition from a figured border image as well.

Finally, since this is only colors (there is no figured image with some minimum display height), you may trim the height of your creation to only three pixels to minimize filesize. Image-Resize-1100x3 will result in tiny filesize.