Hi, and welcome to USENET!
I am designing a website for my sisters wedding and I am having
trouble getting the tables to appear the correct size in IE. They are
great in Firefox. I have set the table at 100% and I want the left
column of the table to be 164 pixels so the images will appear lined
up.
Tables? What tables? Ah, you have decided to use tables for for your
page, even though your page's content isn't really tabular. This may be
great for whatever editing tool you're using, but it'll cause you some
trouble, and isn't really clean markup.
Possibly you don't care about making good pages. I can imagine that you
just want to get the site up before the wedding (in October,
apparently), after which the whole thing will disappear the next time
the domain registration comes do. But for exercise and discussion
purposes, I have studied your site (well, really, just this first page),
and I have some comments and suggestions for you.
The question you raise is a bit obscure, because I don't understand what
you mean by "so the images will appear lined up." They look lined up to
me. I'm using IE6. Did you mean IE7?
Where did you get the "164" pixels? None of the images have that
dimension. Also, you don't seem to have tried adding 164 pixels to your
code anywhere.
Using a table for this layout means there's a horizontal scrollbar under
about 980px, just because of some leafy decoration. Also, try print
preview; most of the page gets lopped off.
Some further comments:
Transitional isn't too bad, but a Strict doctype and validation might
help you produce reliable code and predictable results.
The tool you're using is making a mess of the markup and CSS. What does
a class name of .style15 tell you about the kind of HTML element it
I would love it if someone could take a look at my code and figure out
why it won't line up correctly. Here is the web address to check the
page out
www.mulqueenhodgeswedding.com.
Okay. Take a look at
http://mypage.bluewin.ch/jlh/Wedding.htm . That's
my copy of your page, with some changes.
Probably the first thing you'll notice is that the text overlaps the
decorative flora in the upper left. You may not like that (I don't think
it's so nice either), but the page is fully resizable, and can be
printed in its entirety.
Take a look at my markup and the styles I used. Isn't that neater and
clearer? I've used nested divs with background images so your three
floral decorations stay in the corners, and they don't need the alt
attributes you were missing. The deco-bl and deco-br are decorations for
the bottom-left and bottom-right, respectively, so that's how I named them.
I used margin:0 so the vines grow right out of the viewport's edges.
I left out the <!-- --> comment delimiters from the CSS, because
they're not necessary.
I left the default underline for the link, because I hate it when Web
designers hide links from me. I know it says "Click for more
information", but I'd rather it just said "More information" but with a
blue, underlined, link-looking link.
I specified the font-family as little as necessary for this page. I
notice you specified "Lucida Calligraphy" for some things, "Lucida
Handwriting" for a couple of others. I don't see much difference for the
small amount of content for this page, but I implemented the different
specs anyway. I also added the generic face "cursive" because I expect
some visitors won't have either of the Lucidas.
I specified 120% for the page's default font-size, although normally I'd
start with 100%. I don't do much with cursive fontfaces, so maybe they
just start out small. In any case, the font specs I chose emulate the
sizes and proportions you seemed to be aiming for.
I clicked though to the next page and I found the text hard to read. The
cursive style is decorative for small amounts of text, but in bulk it's
really annoying.
I added an <h1> element, to provide a bit of context to visiting persons
and search engines.
You have <title>Mulqueen/Hodges Wedding Home</title>. When I saw that, I
thought to myself, "That's where they're marrying. When they die,
they'll have the funeral at the Lamb/Swarthout Funeral Home." Well, I
guess you mean this to be the Home page for the site about the wedding
of Mulqueen and Hodges. I just pictured some kind of chapel.
I changed the title to use a hyphen, just because I think search engines
might find the names better. Of course, (a) I'm not sure about that, and
(b) I'm not sure search engines will get too excited about this page
anyway. It doesn't have much content, and doesn't mention Meredith
Mulqueen or Mark Hodges anywhere. BTW, isn't it customary to list the
bride first, as in Meredith and Mark are getting married?
Is this page even necessary? Why not move these nice pictures to the
welcome page, include the content that's already there (in a legible
font), and let the search engines and visitors enjoy the rich content?
HTH. See you at the wedding! ;-)
