People searching for a video-call background want one thing: click, download, done. No signup wall, no watermark, no "premium" grid. That single constraint shaped how I built a small gallery of 1920×1080 backgrounds for Teams and Zoom, and most of the work turned out to be file handling rather than design.

The site is live at MeetingBG , if you want to see the result before reading the notes.

One manifest, many pages

Every background lives in a JSON manifest: filename, title, page slug, alt text, dominant color. A small render step turns that manifest into static pages, and Astro builds the rest. There is no CMS, no image API, and no database to keep in sync.

The trade-off is that adding a background means editing a file and redeploying. For a gallery that changes a few times a month, that is a feature: the build fails loudly if an image is missing, and the sitemap is generated from the same source of truth as the pages.

The spec I refuse to compromise on

1920×1080, 16:9.…