Calling Dreamweaver experts...........

[KathyG]

Hi there,

Have searched DW posts but can't find the answers.

Now I know you'll all think me a complete idiot to be even attempting to design my website in DW when I know barely zilch about it, but I've sort of done it and am now struggling with a few little things.

Firstly I've changed a few things on the Home Page and if I add an image or text I'm finding everything else on the page moves around too. I'm hoping there's some setting that I don't know about that'll keep everything where it was??

I remember having this problem when I was putting it all together in the first place but can't remember what I did about it, if anything! Hopefully someone knows what I'm talking about.....

The other thing, (there are millions of things really but these'll do to be getting on with ) I understand you can load any site into DW to see how it's been constructed but can't work that out either......

If anyone does this to my site they'll see what a complete mess it is behind the scenes - and in front of the scenes in some places - so be gentle with me in your criticism please

All help will be very gratefully received

Kathy

[Mountain Goat]

Kathy, hi
I'm sure you'll get an answer here; a guru might need to look at the code view of your home page and see how you've set it up, but just in case, the main DW Forums are at:

http://tinyurl.com/nplsu

Bit scary for a while, but you should find them useful....

Good luck
MG

[KathyG]

Thanks MG, that looks good - I'll search through that lot and see if I can solve the problems.

Kathy

[Angel]

Hi Kathy

I'm not surprised things go wonky when you add something... your layout is based on a table with 18 columns! Getting things in the right place and keeping column widths would be a nightmare.

I validated your HTML and CSS and they both come out pretty clean. I do suggest you get Firefox with the Web Developer Toolbar as it has some very useful tools for debugging.

Hope this helps a little.

[KathyG]

18 columns! Oops!

Yes, I knew it would be a mess in the background. I think that happened (well, that particular mess anyway) because I was trying to get everything more or less in the middle but everytime I add a cell or image it just adds another column anyway.....

I have got Firefox so I'll go and see whether it's got the de-bugging thingy on it.

Thank you for your help,

Kathy

[Angel]

The toolbar is at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/60/

Dreamweaver can be a bit difficult when you try and add stuff in Design View... it's sometimes best to check that your cursor is in the right place in Code View.

Good luck

[KathyG]

Ooh excellent, thanks Marion!!

Kathy

[AndyLucia]

18 columns! Oops!

Yes, I knew it would be a mess in the background. I think that happened (well, that particular mess anyway) because I was trying to get everything more or less in the middle but everytime I add a cell or image it just adds another column anyway.....

I found that as well, but I've now got myself far enough up the learning curve (just) that I can go into the coding area and remove all the unwanted ones!

[KathyG]

I found that as well, but I've now got myself far enough up the learning curve (just) that I can go into the coding area and remove all the unwanted ones!

But wouldn't removing unwanted columns mess everything else up though? Surely DW put them there as a guide to each image/cell? I could go and do a little trial run, see what happens

Good to know it's not just me though Andy, thank you!

Kathy

[KathyG]

Andy,

I've had a look at the code and haven't got a clue which bit constitutes a column!! I do admire all you people who design by code alone! Is that the only way to remove columns?

Sorry I'm being so dense.........
Have been playing about sorting out a few new photos so will now go and check the DW forum and the Firefox thing.

Kathy

[Angel]

Kathy, if you view your table in Design mode, you'll see all the cells. You can highlight a whole column by dragging the mouse, or if you position the cursor at the top of the column until it changes to a fat arrow, you can click to select the column.

You can also merge columns - select as above, right click and merge cells.

A row is denoted by <tr> ending in </tr>
and each column is <td> ending in </td>

Note also all the &nbsp; - these are non-breaking spaces and are inserted by DW. They can also mess up table layouts.

Word of warning... don't mess around too much with chopping & changing or you'll end up re-doing the whole thing as DW will make a mess of the code.

BTW, I started hand coding in 1996! But it's all got beyond me now. So I don't know how on earth anyone is supposed to start hand coding now.

[KathyG]

Hi Marion,

I have succeeded in deleting one entire column - yippee!!
Now though, when I select a column, 'delete column' is greyed out, so it's discovered what I'm up to and won't let me do any more.............

Seriously, I'm way out of my depth, can't find anything that helps on the DW forum and also am having trouble installing the Firefox thing too, it's asking me to choose either a folder to save it into or choose one to open it with, and from the window it gives me I can't even find Firefox. I'm stumped.

Thank you so much all of you for trying to help but I'm going to have to find someone to sit next to me and show me what needs doing.

Kathy

[vrooje]

Kathy,

You may not be able to delete any more entire columns because there aren't any more entire columns to delete. That would be because each row has different column widths, so there's no longer any single column which is coherent from top to bottom.

From looking at your homepage, I can see why DW would think you needed so many columns. You could easily get away with fewer columns until the row with two images (bedroom and dining room). The columns there have different widths than the previous columns.

And then, the row after that has different column widths again. That is going to make DW go crazy, creating lots of little columns so that cells in each row can use the "colspan" attribute to take up different widths.

The rows also don't line up vertically particularly well... though this is pretty easy to fix without adding lots of extra stuff. To be clear, when I say "to fix," I mean to fix the code. I think it looks better if things aren't on an obvious grid, which is the way it is now. So I don't think the appearance of the page needs to be "fixed."

To be honest, I think it would be better if you did the whole thing using divs rather than tables. This kind of layout doesn't lend itself to simple tables. Divs are more finicky in terms of how they look in various browsers, so that's a different style of debugging, but at least the code is pretty clean. And it's my understanding that Google et al. love divs.

But if you want to use tables, I would suggest something different than what you have. Create two separate tables, breaking up your current table right before the bedroom/dining room image row. Both the tables can have no more than 4 columns (including spacer columns), but the columns in table 1 can have different widths than the columns in table 2. That should get you the layout you want without so much excess code.

I'll PM you with an example...

[KathyG]

Vrooje,

I've only just realised why I've got all those columns!! To the other complete DW novices out there: every time you add a cell to a table that doesn't follow exactly where the other cells are, you get another column!! Wish I'd known that at the beginning!

What all of you won't have seen was all the code that Vrooje has sent me, amazingly herculean task is what it looks like, thank you Vrooje so much. I now have the challenge of showing you that I can make sense of it and apply it......

BTW the 'duck' is a curlew!!

Kathy

[vrooje]

Oops! I know next to nothing about birds, but I make up for it by only using the code view of DW. Translation: I spend way too much time at my computer!

Like Marion, I started writing HTML in 1996, when you pretty much had to do it by hand. Now I'm just set in my ways.

P.S. - for debugging purposes with tables: when I want to know exactly what's going on where with a table, I will temporarily change the table to have BORDER=1 instead of BORDER=0. That usually makes things more clear...