Have finally sussed out most of the issues building the new site without tables and using DIVs and CSS throughout and finally got it so that it works in Firefox, IE8, Safari and Chrome without getting long spaces way below the bottom of the last page element.
The problem was with the way I was asking the software to interpret the background image in the container DIV shifting everything down a notch which is a bug with CSS2 and hopefully should be resolved with CSS3 when it fully arrives. I made the background image appear only in the top DIV and gradient shaded it into a white background colour to resolve all the issues. It is a cobble and I don’t like it but it works.
I just wish all browsers rendered web pages the same way to make my life a whole lot easier. The good news is I now have a template to base the entire site on and I will post it for you to view when I have done the rest of the pages. The other good news is I have a better understanding of CSS and I can manually code a page without the need for Adobe CS5 or similar to create it.
Notepad and a whole lot of reading is your friend so don’t depend on extortionate-costing software to build your site. It may take longer, but the rewards are greater.
yeh i once bought a license of cs4 but tbh really not worth it, dreamweaver creates bad habits and really doesnt teach you how to debug your code etc.
I use notepad++ atm, pretty useful with the syntax hi-lighting and the ability to have 2 documents open side by side in the same instance of the program
I agree with iGod that it does get you into bad habits, but my main issue was like you DT, it took longer to work out what all the buttons did and then found that I couldn’t find out how to get elements positioned correctly on screen. I wanted a specific layout for the customer and in the end coding it in Notepad was the only way.
The other program I tried (Webdwarf and its big daddy Sitespinner) would position elements OK and I used it to lay out the basic plan, but even then it would only initially lay out elements “position:absolute;” and I wanted to stay away from that so that the page elements would link to each other relatively and flow properly when the browser window was resized both in shape and text/image size, mostly to fit in with viewers who use iPads and the like which are on the increase. It meant I had to go through the code anyway and re-jig it to suit my idea, so in the end I coded the whole thing manually.
Here is the one finished page that I’m going to use as a template for the others. http://www.smarttrees.com/testsite/crownr.htm
It still needs some tweaking, but it works and that’s all that’s important
