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 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.