Dreamweaver is messing up my layout

[The_Mercenary]

I made my page in dreamweaver, and when I'm in layout/standard view it looks exactly how I want it, however, when I test it the layout messes up and it pushes some of the bottom parts of the page down. I know horizontal bars can do things like that so I removed them from the page, but its not helping, the page is just getting pushed down. Anyone know how to fix this?

also, how do you make layers in Dreamweaver?

[Black_phoenix]

Hi can you post a link to the page online so we can see the code and how the page is created?

pretty hard to fix something we cant see

bp

[The_Mercenary]

k, www.backbreaker.net/index2.html
it doesnt look all that messed up, but the bottom of the page is messing up, in dreamweaver, the black lines are higher up. Also, the page is really screwing up when I open it up in IE, the whole thing just gets stretched from left to right.

[admedia]

wow, that's one gigantic table.

[The_Mercenary]

well I'm new to the whole dreamweaver thing....any idea how I can fix it?

[admedia]

I would scrap this and start out by building a proper HTML 3-column table layout.

First make a 3 row table, make it the width you want this table to be... I see 734 pixels, so make it 734 pixels.

Put your toolbar.swf inside of the first row.

Next put a 3 Column table inside of Row 2, width 100%.
Set your 3 columns in that table to valign top.

Inside each column put your left / middle and links content tables accordingly.
So in the left colun you will need a table with rows to contain Recent Stories, News, Videos...

The middle column gets a table that contains News etc...

The right column gets Links...

Put your horizontal line for the footer on the bottom.

Oh I forgot about your graphics flanking the sides of the layout... put all of this inside the middle column of another 3 column table. First column contains bottomVerside.jpg as the 'Backround' image, put a 22 pixel wide spacer gif in there...

The far right column has bottomVertside2.jpg as a backround image.

I know it looks like alot, but that's how I would do it for proper table based layout.

Everyone uses CSS now, it can be done with CSS as well, but this is the table way.

[The_Mercenary]

I'm trying that right now, but the table lines are visible
....edit: when I make it invisible, it leaves a space in between the images

[admedia]

you need to play with table border, padding, spacing and some background colors...

using those attributes you should be able to achieve whatever look / spacing you want.

[The_Mercenary]

k, thanks.
though, I'm still wondering what could cause my layout to mess up when it looks normal in dreamweaver.

[admedia]

k, thanks.
though, I'm still wondering what could cause my layout to mess up when it looks normal in dreamweaver.

Never trust the DreamWeaver layout window. Think of that just as a rough preview tool. I always have the site in dreamweaver also open in a browser. When I want to see the effects of any layout changes I just save in DreamWeaver and refresh the browser.

[The_Mercenary]

yea thats what I do too, cept I didnt know why it was messing up. Anyways, thanks. I got it to work your way, its good. Some of the layout still gets a tad bit moved, but thats fine, it looks normal on IE and Mozilla now. Thanks.

[admedia]

It should make it easier to update that way as well... good luck with it.

[The_Mercenary]

thanks