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Background

resolvedResolved · Low Priority · Version CS3

Nicholas has attended:
Dreamweaver Introduction (2 days) course

Background

Hi There

Hope you might be able to help me out with a couple of things:-

1. I can set my background image to be as a gradient (by creating an image with gradient in Photoshop), but I can't figure out how best to use this. The background looks great until you get a long page (ie. the image is not tall enough). In this case it either repeats or is blank from the point at which it ends onwards. I've dabbled with the CSS options with no luck (I'm still very much finding my way with all this!). Is there a way to ask my background image to stretch according to how long the page becomes?

2. How do I access my 'global' css file? I may well already be doing this without realizing!

3. I've setup a form on the "contact us" page of the site, but I cannot get the message to send to my email address. Is it because it is a yahoo address I'm trying to send it to? When the 'submit form' button is pressed, the screen & information remains in place (even though the settings are as "_blank") - it is as though nothing has happened? The website is www.luff2moveu.co.uk - can you have a look and advise please?

Thanks for your help in advance!

Nick

RE: Background

Hi again Nick,

ONE)

You have to stop the repeat of the background image (which is turned on by default in CSS).

http://www.w3schools.com/css/pr_background-repeat.asp

body
{
background-image: url(stars.gif);
background-repeat: repeat-x;
background-color: white;
}

So the code above repeats the image X axis (left to right) but not top to bottom. Just make sure the background colour you set (third declaration) matches the bottom row of pixels in your image. ie. if your gradient fades from black to white (top to bottom), them make the overall background colour white.

See also: http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_background.asp

See Microsoft's support site for a nice way of doing this:
http://support.microsoft.com/
They have the light blue as their background colour, then they have two lots of background gradients which they place at the top and bottom of the overall page.

TWO)

Check what your global css file is by looking at the LINK tag within your HEAD tags.

Eg. if the href is "/asset/css/global.css", then your file is in folder Asset and then in folder Css, and the file is called global.css. Just find the file in Dreamweaver Site panel, or Windows Explorer, and double click the file to open/edit it.

If you open it in Dreamweaver, you can use the CSS panel to edit the CSS styles using the Dreamweaver dialogue boxes. But I prefer to edit them in plain text because I learn more, and at the end of the day, it's quicker.

If you can't see a LINK tag in your HEAD tags, then you don't link to a global css file (you'd probably have loads of declarations within some STYLE tags instead - not as clean as a global file).

THREE)

You're using 'mailto' as your form action. The e-mail address (yahoo) hasn't nothing to do with it. Yes, technically you can use 'mailto' as your action, but this is very old school.

Using 'mailto' means the browser will use whichever mail program is set as the default in the Internet Settings. This is bad, because some of your visitors may not have anything set, or indeed use web mail (gmail, yahoo, hotmail), and thus have no Outlook account set up on their machine.

You should really make or get a proper e-mail form installed. Try http://bravenet.com/webtools/emailfwd/ which is free.

You should be able to use the fields you already have in your form with the Bravenet tool. Probably just have to add a few hidden fields and change the Action of the form.

Regards, Rich

RE: Background

Thanks again Rich.

Sun 3 May 2009: Automatically marked as resolved.

 

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