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Futzy
September 20th, 2009, 01:07 PM
I'm making a website for my school newspaper, and since this is the schools first year, we have to make everything from scratch.
That also means we can do anything we ant and define what other people will be doing in the future.

So what I need help with is a bit of HTML. I'm not the website editor, but since I am the graphics editor I am working closely with him.
Right now we've got the basic layout of the site set up, but nothing functional or correctly coded.
http://theshsoracle.com/beta/

The website editor has never used dreamweaver before, only some cheap program called sitespinner that doesn't have many features. I got him set up with the whole cs4 suite, but he still doesn't know anything about the features of dreamweaver.

What we need to know right now is how to make the boxes we have now sizable to fit to the text. I know there is a way to do it and I read a tutorial on it a very long time ago, but I forgot what it is called or how to do it.

And he got go-daddy for some terrible reason so we don't have access directly to the ftp, which means we cant use Contribute, which would have made updating the site so much easier.

We need to get this thing up and running quickly, so any help that you can give with this matter and any other html tips you have would be greatly appreciated.

legionaire45
September 21st, 2009, 10:14 PM
Don't use Dreamweaver until you/he/she/whoever knows what they are doing (http://www.htmldog.com/).

If you're looking for something particular, go on www.delicious.com and search around.

If you are using GoDaddy, you probably do have access to your ftp - back when I used it with my hosting, I had something like "ftp.morgancabral.com" that I could use. I even was able to make a shortcut with it on my desktop. If you're just using GoDaddy for the domain name I'm not sure how exactly the hosting works, but you should have access to some hosting place somewhere. Find that and then you can directly access it.

A rough idea of what you are going to want to do:



<div id="container">
<div id="header">
</div>

<div id="content">
<div id="navbar">
<ul id="nav_list">
<li id="nav_list_item"><img src="link/to/image/here/"></img></li>
...
</ul>
</div>

<div id="content_main">
<p>Whatever</p>
</div>

</div>
</div>


and then your CSS



html, body, div, span, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6
{
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}

#container
{
margin: 0px auto;
width: 960px;
/* Or something like that */
}


... from there you can work it out on your own. Just work through the html dog stuff real fast - it took me two hours to read through on my first time and I got a decent understanding of basic HTML. That, there are things that make your life easier like the 960 Grid System (http://960.gs). Etc.

Cojafoji
September 21st, 2009, 10:20 PM
trust me. avoid scalable background images. they only work in certain browsers.

edit: if you don't plan on scaling them, you can slice and dice the site, so that you can set the image as a bg for a div and then overlay the text.