Archive for the ‘Web Design’ Category

I have been busy making changes to my web sites and my hosting services. I have updated my services and added more features and increased the service. That is my File-House Web Hosting that hosts my own sites, this one included. I first moved this site then had some problems with the data base and have been offline almost two days. I got some great help through my friends at Dragon Tree Studio. They are working on a new template for this site and the theme I am using is just a hint at what is coming. I hated the one I had and went to a rough draft instead as I like it much better. If you need help creating your very own theme based on your blog or pretty much any web site built or designed as well as graphic design. I highly recommend that you contact Dragon Tree Studio. . I know you will not be disappointed.

I kept myself occupied pretty much of the morning by making a change in my sidebar. I wanted a double head over the left and right columns and had to work it out to get it to display correctly. Jenn over at Everyday Randomness pointed me in the right direction telling me that I needed to mod the sidebar.php page in my themes directory. Of course it was a little more involved than simply adding a few lines of text. I had to add a division to the page plus add a division to the style sheet also. Not too bad but I sure am glad I know how to cut and paste. Its easier to copy then mod some code rather than writing it from scratch. You can see the result of a few hours of off and on work by looking at my ad on the right. I have been hosting websites for friends for some time now and intend to expand hosting to blogs also. Let me know if I can help you, or any input you might have. Thanks.

Creating tables is relatively easy to do. But can become confusing especially when you want a background image in them. The proper way to create a table with a background is written like this:

<table
style=”background-image: url(http://www.your-site/your-image.jpg); width: 100%;”
border=”2″ cellpadding=”2″
cellspacing=”2″>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style=”text-align: center; vertical-align: middle;”></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>


Notice the way the backround image is written. this way will validate according to the W3 ( The World Wide Web Consortium). Now you can use the “background=http://www.yoursite.com/image.jpg” but this will not validate and is actually incorrect. Notice the width is set to 100%. This can also be set to a value determined by pixels, such as 700 pixels which would fit most screens. I prefer to use percentages as they will adjust to fit different size screens. You can also set the border, cell padding and cell spacing to any value you wish. These values are all in pixels.
Notice also that the td style is set to text align center and verticle align to middle. default if you are using Nvu would be “<td align=”undefined” valign=”undefined”>” which again will not validate. to be correct you need to set these values. This is where your table cell content will go, between the td tags:

<td style=”text-align: center; vertical-align: middle;”>This is where your text, images or another table (nested) will go.</td>

I hope this has helped you. If you are not sure of this or need more explanations let me know in the comments box and I will be glad to add more to this or another post to elaborate further.