coffeecup 08-

I have never tried this before and have no experience with html what so ever, i hope my questions don't come off as silly but I am an absolute novice. Here goes, whenever i select a layout in visual editor and then i select a background, for some reason the background always sits ontop of the layout or rather in the foreground. How can i place a background totally behind all the words and banners in my layout without leaveing white spaces. Thanks guys.

Deuce,

If you are using the HTML Editor 2008, then one way to set background is to select the code edit tab. Near the top of the page, you should see the start of a style section. Just enter the background in the body style.

As an example, you could have a RED background by using style that looks like:
body {background-color:#FF0000;}

If you want a background with a graphic that repeats all over the page, your code would look like this:
body {background-image: url('backgnd.gif');

If you want the background to be a single graphic that is centered in the page and does not move, it would look like:
body {
background-image: url('/backgnd.gif');
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-attachment: fixed;
background-position: center center;
}

You could set your background color to a solid green, and have a red to yellow varigation at the top by using this:
body {background-color:#00FF00
background-image:url('redtoyellow.gif');
background-repeat: repeat-x;
}

If you use your imagination, you can set all sorts of things. Now please do not make fun of my color selections. My wife says I am color challenged.

Let us know what you specifically want to accomplish, and if you have it, a link and someone will be able to give detailed help.

I appreciate your help and I think I understand now. My problem is I need to learn html, I ignorantly thought I could just do everything in the visual editor. I have no knowledge of html code or language, so I think i should start there before I try messing around with this. Thank you very much for your help.

Deuce,

Good luck with your studies, and ask here for help understanding how to use HTML and CSS. There are many topics here that cover various HTML and CSS usages, and new topics are always welcome.

This is one part of CoffeeCup that I don't like. There are many things that I will have to get used to though. I am coming over from MS Frontpage and I want to make a full transition to CC, but I'm finding some things aren't as easy to do as it was in Frontpage. Like this for instance. In Frontpage, you could add a background image without going to the html editor. It also has a font bar at the top for changing font color and style. Small things to get past, but I grew accustomed to how easy it was to make those changes in the visual editing part of Frontpage.

The reason for my switch is that I want an editor that still has a community and a company that is still working on this. Microsoft has abandoned Frontpage, so it's practically uselss now.

David,

Welcome to the community.

By learning to use the HTML Editor, you will find that it becomes very easy to make a site-wide change without editing every page. For that to happen, you create and edit a CSS page for your site, specifying things like how wide you want the pages to be, a site-wide background, font sizes and colors, etc. You can then specify what parts of that style sheet you want to use as you are creating a page. Later when you decide to change your font style for the site, make the change in the CSS file and it happens site wide.

If you have any questions, be sure to ask here. There are many folks that have seen and done a lot with web pages, and they are willing to help.

One of the problems with a lot of WYSIWYG Visual Editors has always been the amount of extra html code they add into the page. This makes for slower downloading on slower internet connections.
The great thing about learning how to code is learning how to streamline everything and limit the code to that which is purely essential for efficient working pages. You have much more control on how you page will appear on lots of different platforms and browsers. Bill is absolutely right in mentioning how much easier life becomes when you learn how to create one css page/file which can then be used to make changes throughout a whole web site of dozens and dozens of pages. It is enough to make your changes in that one css page/file instead of having to wade through all those pages making a change in each one of them!
Stick with it, and you will be very glad that you made the leap! I swear that I bless the day that I was introduced to the CoffeeCup HTML Editor!