Lesson 28 – Position:Fixed

Absolute positioning is good, very good, in fact, but sometimes you may end up in a situation where it’s not the answer. This is where fixed positioning comes in. Does the word ‘fixed’ sound familiar? If it does, you’re right to think so. Think back to this post, with the non-repeating backgrounds, and you’ll find out. Except, with Divs, you need to position it in pixels, not just by typing ‘center’, or ‘left bottom’, etc. Here’s the code you’ll need:

#IDNAMEGOESHERE { border: 2px groove #3399DD; font: 12px Arial; text-indent: 3px; height: 200px; width: 300px; overflow: auto; position: fixed; left: 100px; top: 100px; right: 100px; bottom: 100px; }

• There’s not much to it, really, is there? It’s very similar to absolute positioning, except that you put “position: fixed;” rather than “position: absolute;”.
• Remember that you can’t position it using left, right, top and bottom. You can only use combinations such as left bottom, and right top.
• This will have the same effect as it did on your backgrounds. When you scroll down on your page, the Div Box will remain in the same position, always. At times this can be very useful, for features on your webpage such as navigation, for instance.

The only warning I’ll give you, is to be careful where you position your Div Box in relative to other text that you may have on your page. You don’t want to have your fancy Div blocking all of your text, now do you? Bye.

Lesson 27 – Positioning Your Div Box

So, now you have your Div boxes. Great! You’ve made yourself a simple layout now. But the trouble is, you can only put these boxes on the far left, far right and centre of your page. This is where positioning comes in. Now you can put your Div boxes, wherever you want them. But be careful – this can go very wrong… Anyway, let’s start with the code:

#IDNAMEGOESHERE { border: 2px groove #3399DD; font: 12px Arial; text-indent: 3px; height: 200px; width: 300px; overflow: auto; position: absolute; left: 100px; right: 100px; top: 100px; bottom: 100px; }

• Woah, that’s a lot of coding, isn’t it. Well don’t worry, you already know most of it, from here, so you only need to concentrate on the text that is coloured.
• So what is the coloured text? Basically, that’s what will position your Div box wherever you want it, and you don’t even need all of it
• The “position: absolute;” part, tells the web browser that your Div box will always be in a certain place on the page. For example, it could be 100 pixels from the left of the window, and 100 pixels from the top of the window.
• You can customize everything coloured, except for the “position: absolute;” part (I’ll get onto that in a later post). But you only need to use two of the options (i.e: top & left, right & bottom).
• Make sure that when you position your boxe, they don’t conflict with your padding or margins, or cover up some other text on the page, because it looms messy and unprofessional.
• But finally, the most important tip: don’t position your Div boxes just for your computer, and your computer alone – the chances are, your layout will work for your computer, and your computer alone. Be aware that some people will have different screen resolutions to you.

And that’s it for now. If you’ve forgotten the HTML code for your Div box, then click here. (The positioning will not affect this code). Bye for now, and have fun positioning your Div boxes. (I know that sounds really sad…)

Lesson 26 – ID’s (Part Two)

I’m going to skip right to the chase here, for some reason. As well as all kinds of text, ID’s can be applied to tables, divs, and images, as well (there is some really, really cool stuff you can do with images, as well, but I can’t do them myself). Here’s the CSS code for you, for images:

#IDNAMEGOESHERE { border: 2px groove #3399DD; padding: 3px; }

• Yeah, unfortunately, there’s not much I can really do with images, to be honest. Check back to the borders and images post, for reference on how to customize these.
• Remember to put a new ID for your image, as well. And here is the HTML code for it:

<img src=”yourimageswebaddressgoeshere” id=”IDNAMEGOESHERE”>

• Remember to change the ID name for your image in the HTML, as well as it’s URL, or it won’t work for you.

Unlike the images, I can do a lot more with Divs and Tables. Now, a Div box is like a table, except it only has one column, and it is easier to position on your page. You’re less likely to get in a mess, putting Divs in Divs, than Tables in Tables. Here is some stuff you can put in their ID’s CSS:

#IDNAMEGOESHERE { border: 2px groove #3399DD; font: 12px Arial; text-indent: 3px; height: 200px; width: 300px; overflow: auto; }

• That is a lot of stuff to look at, isn’t it. Well, most of it is stuff that you’ve done before, like the border of your Div or Table, the Text Indent, Height, and Width.
• Now, a good thing about Divs, is that you can specify the font which you want in your Div, and only in your Div. However, you may want to use a <p> tag for your text inside Divs instead, in case you want to use italic, bold, or fancy text in your Divs (excluding headers).
• Then, there’s the “overflow: auto;”, bit. Sounds technical, doesn’t it? Don’t worry. Basically, if your text inside your Table or Div ends up being longer than 200 pixels of height, then it will go into ‘scrolling’. Scrolling just means that you’ll be able to scroll in your little box, like you can on most webpages.
• Here’s the HTML code for these two:

<table id=”IDNAMEGOESHERE”><tr><td>Whatever you want inside your little box (text, images, etc) goes here. Remember to code the right amount of columns and rows you want!</td></tr></table>

<div id=”IDNAMEGOESHERE”>Whatever you want inside your little box (text, images, etc) goes here.</div>

---

Now, you may not think it, but that was a very valuable part of making your own webpage layout. You’ve just learned how to make a Div box, and how to specify it’s height and width. You even know how to get it to scroll for you! Have fun with your Images, Divs and Tables!

Lesson 25 – ID’s (Part One)

Yeah, so I’ve spent a while trying to write a post for AJCann, but I then eventually decided that it would be too difficult to explain it in a post, until I’ve covered some other stuff. So basically – I’ve wasted a lot of time. A week or so, to be more precise. But anyway, on to a very important post for you all.

So now you have quite a lot of tags, don’t you? You have your <p> tags, your strikethroughs, your bold text, and don’t forget your links, either. Well, what if you want two kinds of these sort of tags, for instance. What if you want certain text for the left side of your page, and certain text for the other side of the page? (I know, that probably sounds a little weird, but it could happen). That’s where ID’s come in. ID’s can give you two kinds of <p> tag, or header, or whatever kind of text you like. Here’s a code you would use:

#IDNAMEGOESHERE { font: 12px Courier; color: #663399; text-align: left; text-indent: 1px; }

• In case you were wondering, the “#”, which I have put in bold, is something you always need to put before your ID name (which you can change to whatever you want, by the way).That tells the web browser, reading your CSS, that the tag you’ve just formatted is an ID.
• Change the the height, colour, and the font itself to whatever you want. It’s all customizable to whatever you like.
• Due to the fact that you now know about aligning divs, you do not actually need to align your text in the CSS, but it can be quite helpful, depending on the situation you’re in. And you never actually needed the text-indent anyway, so use it if you like.

So now you have your nicely named ID (I hope it has a better name than my one does). The question you’ll probably ask yourself now, is how do you apply this to your text? Actually, it’s very simple. This is all you need to do:

<p id=”IDNAMEGOESHERE“>Text goes here.</p>

• That is, literally, all there is to it on the HTML side. Remember to put the ID name you chose, in between the “”, or else it won’t work!
• Also, you can change it from the <p> tag to what ever text tag you want. It’s really that simple! All you’ll have to do, is replace the two ‘p’s with the name of the tag you desire.

And that’s it for now. But for any of you wondering, this is what the text with the applied ID would actually look like!

Lesson 24 – A Simple Div

Divs are actually used all over the internet. They are a brilliant way of doing many things, and are probably the most popular way of formatting a webpage, (aside from flash perhaps). But flash can get very annoying, and it is very difficult to code. I would show you how to code it, but I’d need someone to show me how, first!

Probably the most simple div I can show you, is a div that will align things to the left, or right, or center. They can also be used to align ‘justify’, like on Microsoft Word, but this only works with text. The rest will work with tables, paragraphs, images, almost anything you can think of. It does save a lot of time, because then you don’t have to put ‘<p align=”center”>’, for instance, all of the time. And here is the code for an aligning div:

<div align=”center“>Anything you want to be aligned center, should go here.</div>

• Pretty self-explanatory, isn’t it? The text in bold, (in between the inverted commas), can be changed to left, right, or justify (only for text, though), to suit you.

These are really useful to align what you want. I generally find myself using them to align several things to the same place, so that I can save myself some typing (yeah, I’m lazy). So anyway, that’s enough for simple divs. Bye.

So…. what to do now, you ask?

Sorry this post took so long, it took me ages to root up the link I originally had to the site below. It was in my email archives somewhere, and well, that’s a dangerous place to go. But anyway, here are some examples of the next things CSSBytes will be showing you how to make.

You might think that you can already make layouts, and that is true, with the use of tables. However, putting tables inside tables, for instance, can get very cluttered, and make your page look, well…  look like a big eyesore. With the use of these things called Divs (short for divisions, I believe), as well as ID’s (which is really what you’d think it might be), you can make your own layouts like on the page above.

A bit boring, you probably think, looking at the layouts on the other page. Well, you can spruce them up, with CSS, as well as some software such as Adobe Photoshop CS3 (which I just got – yay!), or simply MS Paint. So, in the next post, we’ll be getting started, with some simple Divs. Until then, bye!

Finally! WordPress Helps me Out!

Yeah, it has been a long time since I posted, blah, blah, blah, please don’t remind me. My holiday ended recently, so I am not in the best of moods, obviously. But this did cheer me up a little.

Basically, if you didn’t know before, it is very hard to format CSS in blog posts on WordPress, or so I thought. Thankfully, my friend showed me the link above, which now explains to me how to format CSS in blog posts. Thank you! Yeah, I’m rambling on about nothing, aren’t I? Well, to stop your suffering, this’ll be it for my post. Bye.

Lesson 23 – More :Hover…

Yes, so if you’ve read an earlier post, showing you about hyperlinks that go on your page, you should already be familiar with the :hover, and what it does. If not, then basically, it’s what something (in the previous post’s case it was a link) will look like, whilst you hover over it with your mouse. But, this feature isn’t just for links. It can be used for many other things too, such as the following:

Text

Yes, so basically, any type of text has a :hover feature. This means normal text (<p>), bold, italic, underlined, strikethrough, overline, links, headers and simply any type of text, including any tags which you might make up yourself!This is the code you need for it:

p { font: 10px Arial; color: #000000; } p:hover { font: bold 15px Times; color: #FFCC99; }

• This was just an example. But anyway, see the bit in bold? That’s what you add to any of the tags mentioned above, if you want them to have a :hover attribute.
• You can also use this to fool people into thinking that piece of normal text is actually a link. They’ll press on it, and obviously, nothing will happen. That’s for all of you mean people out there!

Images and Tables

Those two are generally the more popular tags to have a :hover attribute, especially the images. It will be a very simple hover, at this stage, but you can do some very fancy ones. Here is the code for them:

img/table{ border: 1px solid; color: #000000; }img/table:hover { border: 27px groove; color: #FFCC99; }

• Of course, unlike with the text, your tables and images will have their borders edited instead. What I have showed is a little extreme, from one to twenty seven pixels, but it’s just an example. Try out both of the examples if you like!

That will be it for now. You don’t necessarily have to have the :hover attribute on any of your text whatsoever (not even the links), but it is a nice was to spruce up your text. Until later, ciao!

Lesson 22 – Linking to Your Stylesheet

It may seem a little confusing, the title, but basically this post is about how to set up your CSS for your page. It’s something I have apparently missed out on showing you, which is a little embarrassing. But anyway, on we go. The code required to do this, needs to be placed in the head section of every page in your website. Generally, if you are making a website, you can just copy and paste a document which includes the layout of your page, along with the link to your CSS Stylesheet, on each new page you write, before you start. If you can’t find a head section on your page, look for the tags: <head></head>, and if necessary, write your own. Here’s the all important code:

<link href=”yourcssfilegoeshere.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css”>

• That’s it really. Make sure the code goes in between those head tags, and it’ll work fine.
• However, if you do get your website set up on the internet, it is a little different. What you need to do, is copy and paste your CSS Stylesheet onto a page onto your website. Here is the updated code you need:

<link href=”http://theurlofyourstylesheet.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css”>

• As you can see, there isn’t much of a difference. Instead of linking to a file which is on your computer, and only your computer, you’ve linked to a stylesheet that’s on the internet, which everyone can see, if they want to.

That’s the end of this much-needed post. I apologize for forgetting how to show this to you, but, I have now. In case you haven’t noticed, CSSBytes has finally reached a thousand hits and beyond! Yay! I won’t be writing any posts until next Wednesday or so, because I’ll be on a short break. Click here for a little more information. Bye.

Lesson 21 – Background Music

Now, I personally wouldn’t like having background music on my website, or any website that I may visit, because the chances are, I won’t like the music that is being played. Nevertheless, I’m sure some people would want this, so I’ll post this. Anyway, like the post before, Background is only available for IE users (I believe), but I’m not very clear on the subject, so I may be wrong. My coding hopefully won’t be wrong, but I suggest you do a Google search for some extra help, after reading this post. Here’s the code for it (note – it may be wrong):

<bgsound src=”yourmusicfile.mp3″ loop=’infinite’>

• There is no CSS code for background music, so you will just have to make do with a HTML one. Still, at least it’s a short one!
• I believe it can be almost any format, but you will need to host the file on an internet site. I can’t really help you with this, but I’m sure that another Google search can.
• And finally, the “loop=’infinite'” part, means that your background music will just be constantly repeated until the person leaves the page.  Just remove it, and your music will only play once. Simple.

That is it for now. I hope this post has helped you, as I have told you all that I know about this subject (which isn’t really much). And, to add to that, this is the end of the body section. I shall be moving on to other things now, which I haven’t decided yet. Bye-bye!