But I want the background gradient to take up the whole screen, no matter what their monitor size is, which it does now with the present design. That's what gives it the professional look.

Click on "Settings" at the top. Then Background fill properties. Then Continue the page background fill.

Thanks Eric.

Now if I'm really gonna learn about this stuff, I need like a reference thing for the terms.

One thing that might be a good exercise, is to dissect my present site and learn what's controlling things like the page borders, padding spaces and all that, but I need a reference to learn from. Any place around here for that?

Just started a test site at http://lakewoodcolorado.net/TEST/
Not a bad start, anyway.

Ok, need to find out how to put h1 tags around the title text on the upper right, with VSD?

Also, I'm gonna need to get that script stuff into VSD for the acronyms on the right.

It would be an absolutely brilliant innovation if CoffeeCup could integrate VSD and HTML editor, so you could edit html things visually in VSD and even refer to an external style sheet.

Hmm, problem with the background at the VSD test page.
http://lakewoodcolorado.net/TEST/
It's working fine horizontally, expanding to fill the space, but repeating vertically, which looks bad.
See the look at http://www.ColoradoProcessServers.net to compare.

Now I'm getting to the part of re-creating the menu box and duplicating THAT in VSD is gonna be a BEAR!

Oh, wasn't someone saying earlier in this thread, that this new development path I'm playing with, might be moved to sort of a mentoring thread here? Maybe under VSD? Like maybe my last 4 posts above?

Sounds like you're enjoying VSD


Coffee Cup has its own Sitemapper software so you can still have this.

The menu as on your original site is not difficult to create in VSD. Have a play with the Buttonize feature.

For your background, if you don't want a hard contrast where the pattern starts to repeat (vertically), you could make it extra-long; something like 3000px, but only around 50 px wide (let it repeat horizontally). Keeps the file size small and looks good even if all your pages aren't the same length.

Melissa, there is still too much content in the right pane, so if you want to have the horizontal line across the whole width of the content, you will have to leave a lot of white space below the logos.

What you could do is making either the side bar wider (that means reducing the size of the main picture)
Or the text of the sidebar smaller,
Or move some of the sidebar text to below the logos, as suggested earlier,
Or reduce the size of the main picture a little bit and move it a tad to the right and down, so that you get more space above and to the left of it.

That's what I can think of, off the top of my head.

But all in all, the start you have made looks promising.